Words

An extract from Matt Haigs recent release, The Comfort Book;

‘…there was a gap between what I looked like and what I felt like. And the only way to bridge that gap was by talking and writing about what was going on inside me. And yes, in the philosophical sense, words are never quite the thing they describe, but that is also their use. They can help externalise, internal things. The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a shared world. This shared world we call ‘language’. Once we take our personal unseen experiences and make them seen, we help others, and even ourselves, to understand what we are going through. What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point. Words don’t capture, they release.’

This book came to me during my summer of social media absence and contributed to the confidence I needed to start this blog. The passage resonated so deeply with me when I read it that I felt compelled to share it. I don’t want to dilute it by adding my own ideas of what words are. You’ll get to read a lot more of my words in good time and what role they play in my life. And if you haven’t already, go out and get your hands on a copy of ‘The Midnight Library’, because I still think about it all the time, it’s medicinal.