It's kind of incredible, if you think about it, that people can experience improved mental health just from hearing or reading, or saying or writing, the right thing at the right time. That certain combinations of words can change our thoughts, physiology - even save our life.

A bit maddening, too - Borges' infinite library where the vindication of your life as lived exists, somewhere, but there's just So Much you might search all your days & never find it. & the words might be good for today, but how about tomorrow? Next month?

Today's liberation can be tomorrow's prison. Something that gets us through a problem can cause terrible problems later on if we keep applying it. I see so often how conspiracy theorists & people in cults often survived terrible losses. The story gave them meaning.

Maybe it's not just the words. Maybe the theatre, the ritual of it, gives an exchange power. I think of myself as a rationalist but secretly I dream of that moment of grace, a word or glance or touch from some holy person where the suffering held in my body just *leaves*.

A belief in the exact right words, to the right person, at the right time, has silenced me more often than not. It's a form of perfectionism. There are things I never said, because I wouldn't allow myself to say them the best I could, when I could. I wanted to nail it.

I wonder how it would look & feel if we all worked on learning to listen better. To help in the cooperative process of self-expression. I realise there are power dynamics that might come into it. But I wonder what it would do for a group, to train in mutual listening?

Maybe it's not the kind of thing you can engineer like that. I know that talking isn't a magic cure. Wish it was. But I think it can be a consolation, or part of a process of alchemy. Part of that much-overused word: healing.