Everywhere I turn, there’s discourse. People are talking, but the conversations aren’t productive. It feels like everyone is competing to feel heard. Rattling off statistics, flexing an impressive vocabulary, and turning what’s supposed to be a conversation about the issue into an exercise in dominance rather than joint collaboration of a shared solution, or mutual understanding. Meanwhile, resentment and frustration continue to mount, progress stalls, and communities-fractured.

These days, What once was conviction has been reduced to nothing more than a buzzword. Terms that once inspired action and contemplation now incite annoyance and merely serve as hollow signals of one’s own virtue.

What if the problem isn’t what we’re talking about, but how we’re talking about it?

Body language, vocabulary, and sentence structure are the tools we use to communicate our message. These tools shape the story, the connection, and the weight of what we hope another person will receive. But when these tools aren’t wielded with a patient tongue and the care the message deserves, we risk delivering it to a withdrawn heart. Instead of inviting people to come alongside us to carry the weight of such profound need and grief, we push them away. Our tools of communication, when used without intention, become tools not to build bridges of connection and understanding, but to construct walls where there were none.

Admittedly, I’ve spoken more to win than to connect. I’ve mistaken eloquence for empathy and used statistics to undermine another’s moral fear.

These days, I have no interest in making room for debates or sharpening my arguments. Instead, I’m choosing to live out my values rather than talk about them, listening without the need to respond or change someone's disposition, and accepting that no amount of debating will solve the weighted realities we’re all up against.

Everywhere I turn, there’s discourse. People are talking, but the conversations aren’t productive. It feels like everyone is competing to feel heard. Rattling off statistics, flexing an impressive vocabulary, and turning what’s supposed to be a conversation about the issue into an exercise in dominance rather than joint collaboration of a shared solution, or mutual understanding. Meanwhile, resentment and frustration continue to mount, progress stalls, and communities-fractured.

These days, What once was conviction has been reduced to nothing more than a buzzword. Terms that once inspired action and contemplation now incite annoyance and merely serve as hollow signals of one’s own virtue.

What if the problem isn’t what we’re talking about, but how we’re talking about it?

Body language, vocabulary, and sentence structure are the tools we use to communicate our message. These tools shape the story, the connection, and the weight of what we hope another person will receive. But when these tools aren’t wielded with a patient tongue and the care the message deserves, we risk delivering it to a withdrawn heart. Instead of inviting people to come alongside us to carry the weight of such profound need and grief, we push them away. Our tools of communication, when used without intention, become tools not to build bridges of connection and understanding, but to construct walls where there were none.

Admittedly, I’ve spoken more to win than to connect. I’ve mistaken eloquence for empathy and used statistics to undermine another’s moral fear.

These days, I have no interest in making room for debates or sharpening my arguments. Instead, I’m choosing to live out my values rather than talk about them, listening without the need to respond or change someone's disposition, and accepting that no amount of debating will solve the weighted realities we’re all up against.