When a Rose is Not a Rose: How Words Affect Your Mind

Ever read Romeo and Juliet? In a famous dialogue that people misquote all the time, Juliet says of and to Romeo:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet

That’s lovely, Juliet, but really. You’re the Elizabethan emo kid who offed yourself for a boy-man. Should we really be building a philosophy around you?

I say that only half joking. Let’s take a closer look at what we had to read in high school. What's considered cannon has changed a lot since I was a kid, of course. We read Steinbeck and Hemingway and Plath, The Great Gatsby and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Everyone dies or kills themselves either in the stories or real life. Kids tell me it’s not so different now, in terms of what they have to read in high school. I came out of high school believing I couldn’t write unless I was depressed.

Think about this. You’re young and hormonal. You’re dealing with everything teens have to deal with just growing up. Then you are told to immerse yourself in horrors that are beyond most adults’ ability to cope with—usually without much context or support.

Now before anyone gets the idea I’m a book burner, anti-education, anti-reality, or anti-anything, stop. Just stop. That’s not where I’m going with this. Where I’m going is here.

Words matter.

See, Juliet thinks a rose is a rose is a rose. The fact is, if you called a rose a turd, it would take on a totally different connotation. Before long, it would even stop smelling sweet, because words have the power to shape ideas. Words can spur emotion and action. Your mind largely believes what you tell it to, and we largely use words, even if we’re not saying them out loud.

This doesn’t mean we stop reading the hard stuff. It means we give it context. And we offset it with words that are empowering, motivating and inspiring. We feed our brains something other than gloom and doom and we repeat those words in our head. We program ourselves to be more
positive. You can attribute this phenomenon to psychology, neurology, linguistics, neurolinguistics—you can study it any way you want. Brain sciences confirm you have to be careful what words you put into your brain and when.

If you want to be inspired and motivated, read things that are inspiring and motivating. Let the letters and words seep into your brain. Read them out loud if you want. Or read silently, moving your lips. Listen to the voice in your head. Let the voice read LOUDLY so you can hear the words.

Oh Juliet, I’m sorry—

you got it wrong.

A rose is a rose

because we call it so.

Call it thunder,

and we hear the storm.

Call it onion soup,

and we smell the pungent kitchen.

Call it the edge of a knife

and we feel it touch the softness

of our skin.

Feel how it pricks the forearm,

drawing blood?

That’s mortality leaking out.

Put your sword away.

Stand down.

This is my day.

You don’t belong here.

Until next time,

Katherine

This article is part of a series from my forthcoming book, Get Happy, Dammit. Copyright 2019, All Rights Reserved. Learn more at www.KatherineGotthardt.com.