Setting the elephant free…

Sometimes I wish I could put a sock in it, cease putting my foot in my mouth, zip it, keep my tongue quiet, put my brain into gear before engaging my voice, button it and remain silent.

I don’t mean to come out with the things I do, but there are times when I just can’t help myself. Sometimes, it’s like a pressure builds in me until that sentence or thought that I know everybody is going to be angered/shocked/hurt by has to come out. Of course there’s usually a reason for it – an injustice, stupidity, bigotry – on the part of some idiot or other and sometimes even this idiot.

In days gone by I’d sit quietly in meetings, listening to some corporate crap and nonsense, telling myself to stay calm, keep schtum and carry on. But of course I never could and then the bloody elephant would come running out of the corner of the room, thrashing and trumpeting and dropping his thumping great dollops off elephant shit everywhere, as I dropped my verbal bombshell.

Other times I know what I want to say and it just comes out wrong. I once told a young woman who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer not to die over the weekend. I was thinking it and meant it wholeheartedly. But I knew as the words came tumbling out that I really shouldn’t have said that and should just have told her to have a nice weekend.

Sometimes I wish I had Laliophobia. Being scared of my own voice might shut me up. We all want to be understood. We want others to be able to identify with us, and we use words to communicate our sameness and talk through differences. But sometimes it all goes to hell and you end up wishing that the earth would swallow you up for what just came out of your mouth.

Often the things I say are quite shocking, usually quite funny, but not the sort of thing your maiden aunt or a Baptist minister would approve of. I don’t think we should be scared of saying what we think and feel though. Fear of speaking usually comes about when a person has been ignored, shouted down, or ridiculed and laughed at too often. If no one listens you can sometimes come to the conclusion that it is in your best interests to simply remain silent because you are obviously stupid, wrong, or just opposed to the more powerful person you are not speaking to.

And when it becomes the norm to keep quiet, you can become fearful of actually speaking.

In the worse cases people who have this fear may actually grow to fear what their own voice sounds like, obsessing about it for so long that when they do say something it sounds strange. It may even sound like it isn't their own voice, which may further heighten the fear as they may think that the voices in their head are speaking to them.

Yes, it’s better to let the elephant out than to keep him penned up.

Nuff said?