Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Definitions

To define a word depends much on one's personality and relationship to life, others and oneself. Some people may say that all you need is a dictionary to define a word, but I would beg to differ. Case in point:

The meaning of the phrase "to be supportive" is a huge matter of semantics. I have learned this through experience. For some people, "to be supportive" means running (whether physically or virtually) to your side and gasping and sighing with you and offering a shoulder (again, physical or virtual) to cry on if needed. For others, "to be supportive" means looking you square in the face and saying "well, at least they didn't just come out and say 'you suck'." Personally, I have found it is good to have an equal balance of these two kinds of support in your life. One to let you have your moment to wallow and the other to pull you back to reality. Sometimes being blunt hurts, but it's like ripping off a band-aid: once the initial sting is gone, you can move on with your day.

According to Webster's rejection is defined as: the action of rejecting; the state of being rejected. I, however, have decided that rejection is really defined as motivation in it's rawest form. I spent my fair share of time hearing I wasn't good enough, smart enough, fast enough, strong enough. The only one that I may admit to being true, maybe, is that I'm not tall enough... but that's a topic for another blog. Now that I have been rejected several times, and I'm sure several times more to come, I've decided that it is serving its purpose to make me better. Being told no just makes me want to say, "You wanna bet?" Every "no" is taking me one step closer to the eventual "yes" that, unfortunately, involves a good deal of waiting. (See my thoughts on waiting from Aug 08.)

The dictionary definition of a word is perfectly valid in most circumstances. Unfortunately, there is an entire gray area, life, that the words and their dictionary definitions may not really work for. Because of this, I'm starting my own dictionary.

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