I had to think about “every little word” and its meaning in the first years after my electrocution. Because my heart was not functioning for a span of time, it wasn’t sending oxygen to my brain. The result for me was a situation called Visual Agnosia; which basically means loss of meaning.
In order to try and understand the meaning of words I would isolate each one and repeat it to myself to see how it sounded. Then I’d listen to the inflection in other peoples’ voices when they said the same words; I’d also watch their facial expressions and mannerisms – I wanted to see how the words fit.
It was tedious work. But it taught me to sense the psychological connection to a word’s meaning.
The word Disease, as in Heart Disease, has lost its power. What… you say?
Although Disease means an interruption of an organ’s normal function – we have somehow come to think of Heart Disease as something we’ll think about later, when we’re older. Because we think we have more time to change the outcome.
Um…how do we know that we have more time – especially when we don’t know how much time we have.
What if I called it Heart Poison? Does this bring up a different image?
Would we take more ownership of how we treat ourselves if we thought that certain choices could poison us?
The thing about Heart Disease is that we have some power over it.
Obviously, we cannot change some risks: Family History, Gender, Age, and Factors We Don’t Know Anything About.
But, others are changeable: Weight, Cigarette Smoking, Cholesterol, Inactive Lifestyle, Social Support, Diabetes, Stress, Hostile Personality, and Hypertension.
Try using the word Poison instead of Disease for a while and see if you make better choices.
Sometimes just changing one word can cause us to change the way we think and act.