Let's have a conversation about words. Words can have enormous or negligible effect depending on the speaker and the listener. Ignoring the instances when they have no effect, how do you deal with the situations where they have enormous effect? Imagine this: you're sitting in a car with a boy and you two discuss a wedding where you were a bridesmaid and hung out with him most of the night. Then he says "girl A was beautiful at the wedding. Oh, were you there?" Now, you know full well this wasn't said with the intention of being mean and you also know, realistically, that your presence hasn't been completely forgettable. But the words have been said and they indicate a lack of awareness of you that you hadn't conceived possible up to that point. My question, having to do specifically with thoughtless words, is how do we move past them?

People make throw away comments every day to family and friends that stick with us our entire lives. Sometimes we say things with absolutely no awareness of their power or intention to harm, but they do nonetheless. How does one, as a friend, forgive another friend? Often we just brush it off and while we never forget it was said, we move past it. But can you forgive someone for a thoughtless comment or is the only closure found in verbalizing how it hurt you and hashing it out?

This particular trip home for me has sort of been the motherload of thoughtless comments and this is on my mind, but because of the prevalence I've found myself thinking back to all the times I can remember other thoughtless comments or fights with friends over comments I made that hurt them. And I've never put any thought into the reality of TC's (thoughtless comments) existence beyond doing my best not to make them (since I am at a higher likelihood than most of letting one slip out). But language is what I hope to make my living studying and I hope to write some day, or at least better understand, the ways we create our individual perceptions of reality through language (though I won't write exactly on that because Derrida already did it and I'm so not Derrida). So today, the part of language I am choosing to examine is the TC--thoughtless comment.

The most obvious response to a TC is to verbalize that it hurt you. No doubt in a workplace seminar or couple's counseling this is exactly what they would tell you to do; however, on occasion you have a friend (and don't pretend you don't because we all have at least one) who makes a TC, but if you point out that it hurt they will become so guilt-ridden over hurting you that you will end up comforting them in the end. So you, having received the TC are now in the position of not only having to deal with the TC, but also not letting your friend know you were affected by the TC and are even then, while the conversation progresses, in the process of forgiving them. I would hazard this is a common occurrence.

What I want to know is how do you let that go? Depending on the type and severity of TC you can find yourself questioning any number of things: your appearance, your intelligence, your value as a human being, or even if your presence has been noticed for the past three to five years. These are all fairly happiness-threatening issues that have to be dealt with or they come back up two years later over a pitcher of beer in some dive bar. Not to mention, when that happens (discussing these things over alcohol) and everyone is so very sad it was ever said somewhere in the back of your brain, swimming in the alcohol is the question are they sorry they implied something they didn't mean, or are they sorry I found out about it?

This is the insidiousness of the TC you understand. It gets inside your brain and festers there. Then you, trying valiantly and failing to deal with the TC in some quiet, unnoticed way begin to focus on it and the inability to talk about it only makes it absorb that much more of your concentration. Eventually you do become incredibly uninteresting and a bit of whiner and everyone stops listening to you. Looking in the mirror one day and realizing you've begun to sicken even yourself you suppress the TC like a champ where it lies in wait for the fortifications of your will to weaken with beer and cheap shots. This is the whole sick and pathetic cycle of the TC.

So how do you skip all of that? How do you skip on by to the part where you don't even care? Is it possible? I haven't discovered a process yet, hence my analysis of the evil mind parasite that is the TC. G.I. Joe says knowing is the half the battle, but in this case I'm going to have to say that knowing isn't more than a third, maybe even a fourth. Recognizing the presence of a TC in your brain doesn't do you much good, in fact, it might make you even more crazy because you know it was only a TC and that you should be able to get over it.

I suppose one solution would be to get better friends, but even if that were feasible a) we can't change our family and this happens most often with them (especially mothers) and b) I wouldn't have any friends because I constantly made the TC in my youth.

I've got nothing. One year down towards a PhD and I still can't answer questions like this. Higher education is obviously of no aid in helping you figure out how not to feel like a crazy person. I bet if I wrote a self-help book on dealing with the TC I could make a lot of money though. At least then my crazy would be a rich crazy and I could be promoted to "eccentric." This is a good plan. I'm going to go with it. Let me know what you come up with so I can steal it for the book.