The Lie We Were Taught About Words

I was standing in my neighborhood, mid-conversation, when it happened.

Accusations were being made casually, loosely, the kind of words people throw out without understanding how far they travel. I found myself explaining how what was being said could affect livelihoods, reputations, and futures. How words don’t just hover in the air, they land.

And suddenly, I froze.

Because out of nowhere, that tired old saying surfaced in my mind:

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

I stood there, realizing how many times I had repeated that lie.

Words do hurt.

They hurt your money.
They hurt your reputation.
They hurt your standing in a community.
They hurt your emotional safety.
They hurt your self-esteem.
They distort your vision of yourself and the world.

Words spoken recklessly can wound.
Words spoken with intent can destroy.

Entire families are fractured by words.
Entire lives are shaped by them.

Even words that are whispered instead of shouted.
Even words framed as warnings.
Even words like: “I’ll hurt you if you tell.”

That is not harmless language.
That is violence.

And the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that we were fed this nonsense by elders who never learned how to sit with their own emotions. People who minimized what hurt them, so they minimized what hurt us. People who learned to survive by swallowing pain then passed that survival tactic down as wisdom.

I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head, as clear as if she were standing beside me:

“If it’s not true, why is it bothering you?”

That’s what she said when I asked her why she allowed family members to perpetuate my mother calling me a devil.

Why didn’t you stop my brother, a grown man, from picking on my small child? Taunting her until she cried. Telling her, “That’s why your mother is a devil.”

And the room watched.

Just like they watched when I was a child.

No one protected her.
No one protected me.

Those words didn’t disappear because they weren’t true.
They took root.

A lie my mother created after she attacked me, and I defended myself, became a permanent stain in the eyes of people who never wanted to see me clearly anyway.

And I am grateful to say: I have cut them all off.

Because this is what words do.

They make people afraid to ask you for guidance.
They make people hesitate to trust you.

“I didn’t ask you,” my cousin once said, “because they say you’re evil.”

She said this as I drove her to an appointment.

Or the aunt who once said, “You can’t be as evil as they say, you have such a sweet baby.”

As if goodness must be proven.
As if lies must be balanced with evidence.

Those words mattered.
They shaped perception.
They redirected attention away from who my mother truly is and onto a story designed to protect her image.

Words are easy weapons.

Especially when aimed at someone people already want to misunderstand.
Especially when the lie is convenient.
Especially when silence keeps the peace.

My family tried to destroy me with words.

And here’s the part they never considered:

I could torch the city with truth.

But I didn’t.

That restraint is not weakness.
It is discernment.

So when I say be careful with me, understand what I mean.

Not because I am cruel.
Not because I am dangerous.

But because I understand the power of language.

Words are not harmless.
They never were.

And anyone still clinging to that childhood rhyme has never had their life touched by a lie that others were eager to believe.

Here’s what I know now.

Words reveal character.
And silence reveals alignment.

I no longer sit in rooms where lies are protected.
I no longer explain myself to people committed to misunderstanding me.
I no longer negotiate my humanity with those who benefit from my erasure.

Self-authorship means deciding who gets access to your story.
Boundaries mean removing anyone who uses words to distort it.

I will not correct lies spoken in bad faith.
I will not perform goodness for those who require proof.

I chose myself.

And I will always choose myself over proximity to people who use language as a weapon and call it tradition.