Language is powerful. Words can comfort, clarify, confuse, categorize, criticize, and occasionally cause complete conversational chaos. Human beings are remarkably talented at attaching memories, assumptions, fears, expectations, and assorted emotional debris to otherwise ordinary words, then reacting to the entire pile as though the word itself showed up carrying luggage.
Consider someone who asks a lot of questions. Are they nosy, or are they curious? Someone refuses to give up on an idea. Are they stubborn, or are they persistent? Someone carefully considers all the ways something might go wrong before making a decision. Are they negative, or are they cautious? The behavior may be exactly the same, yet the word we attach to it can completely change the story we tell ourselves about the person.
We do the same thing to ourselves. “I am terrible at making decisions” creates a very different picture than, “I like to think things through before I decide.” “I failed” feels different from, “That did not work.” Neither version changes what actually happened. One simply turns an event into a declaration about who we are, while the other leaves a little room for the possibility that perhaps the experiment, plan, relationship, recipe, career choice, or spectacularly ill-advised home improvement project simply did not work
Humans are particularly talented at this. We take a perfectly innocent word, load it into an emotional trebuchet with twenty or thirty years of assumptions, fling it across the room, and then act surprised when everyone ducks.
Someone who is quiet can be shy or thoughtful. Someone who changes their mind can be indecisive or flexible. Someone who asks for help can be helpless or appropriately resourceful. Someone who refuses help can be fiercely independent or making life unnecessarily difficult just to prove a point. Context matters. Balance matters. Naturally, humans are remarkably good at forgetting both.
Now that we have established that many of us do this, let us wander into slightly more uncomfortable territory.
This is one reason we use the phrase vision changes around here. For some people, terms such as low vision, legally blind, or blind are simply factual descriptions. If you have lived comfortably with those words for years, they may not feel especially dramatic. For someone whose eyesight has recently begun changing, however, those same words can arrive dragging an entire moving van full of fears, stereotypes, assumptions, and predictions about what life is supposed to look like now.
The word did not change your eyesight. It may, however, change what you believe your eyesight means.
Imagine that you can no longer drive because of your vision. “I can’t drive anymore. I can’t go anywhere.” The first statement may be completely true. Somewhere between the first sentence and the second, however, the story quietly grew legs and wandered off.
Try this instead: “I can’t drive anymore, so I need to figure out different ways to get where I want to go.” Your eyesight did not improve. Your car keys did not triumphantly leap back into your hand. You may still be furious, frustrated, inconvenienced, or muttering things about public transportation that are not suitable for polite company. What changed was not the situation. What changed was the meaning you attached to it.
One version says the loss of driving determines where you can go. The other acknowledges the loss and leaves enough space to ask, “Well, now what?” This is not positive thinking with a happy little bow tied around it. Sometimes things stink. Sometimes they stink magnificently. You are allowed to say so. The point is not to pretend unpleasant things are pleasant. The point is to notice when a fact has quietly become a conclusion, or when a description has quietly become an identity.
Other people will do this to us too. They will hear one thing about us and construct an entire person around it. We can become understandably annoyed by those assumptions while simultaneously making equally impressive assumptions about ourselves and the people around us. Human beings are nothing if not consistent in our inconsistency.
So every once in a while, it may be worth asking: What actually happened? What meaning did I attach to it? Is this word describing something about me, or have I allowed it to define me? Am I responding to the situation in front of me, or to every fear, expectation, and assumption I have piled on top of it?
We are never going to stop labeling, interpreting, assuming, and occasionally making magnificent fools of ourselves. Perhaps the useful part is noticing when we do it. Sometimes changing a word changes the story. Sometimes changing the story reveals another possibility. And sometimes noticing the ridiculousness of our own thinking gives us the chance to be a little kinder to ourselves and to everyone else.
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