Working on My Words

I think I’d been sitting listening to office gossip last fall when I first thought about cutting out gossip for New Years. In listening to myself and my speech and the constant (often double-standard) reproofs I get from most of my family (doesn’t help, that ain’t the way) and in thinking over some of my posts and comments I decided I really needed to work on my speech.

In addition, I’m feeling the need to nip the freedom of petty partisan political commentary of one of my coworkers to me. As far as the traditional “taboo” topics, there is a reason they are “taboo.” I just think it should hold as a public taboo but not be taboo in trusted situations because everything needs to be researched and discussed intellectually and in good faith. But more on that in another post.

In terms of my gossiping, complaining, exaggerating, overreacting, etc. habits, I’ve been reproved my whole life and its implied I should “just stop.” That’s not really the way to convince someone especially if they can see the same issues in “respectable” form or other forms of “respectable” speech sins. Judgement doesn’t equal conviction. Also, there are always roots that are harder to dig out; there are more deeper issues than simple self-control, “self control” in this case is repressive/suppressive if I “just do it.”

I do tend to be emotionally explosive, impulsive, exaggerative, anxious, insecure, defensive. These are connected for my verbal barrages and gossip. I’m hoping to do therapy and my life coaching and things of that sort this year which should help.

I’m also (obviously) nosy, bored, and lazy minded. I mean if I can gossip and listen to gossip instead of making the more difficult effort of thinking harder or controlling my spinning thoughts or listening to inane conversations, that is what I do. This is connected to the above, I need to be more proactive, less reactive. My world is too narrow for me, and I live in my head and books and media and not the real world.

I also need to work on the Serenity prayer. For a start, I wrote down a list of things I want to eliminate in my speech patterns. Clearly, the roots need to be dealt with, but I though if I could have reminders and could verbally express things (at least at work, not sure I want to give my family more fodder for disrespectfully shutting me down), that would be a good start as well. Just to kind of be more aware. I wrote the following list down on a card with the heading of “NO.”

• Gossip
• Politics and “news”
• Complaining and “venting”
• Cussing and interjections
• Chattering and filler
• Exaggerative and imprecise speech
• Unverified or out of context facts
• Excessive Covid-19 talk
• Repetitive speech and idle chatter

I think for now, I’m going to try to work on cutting down the amount of talk, then building up the quality of it.