Skylie’s eyes were always red, swollen with dark eyebags outlining her undereye. Her lips were dry and cracked from the lack of care. Her fogged eyes and tapered face compromised the sleepless nights and cries of a perturbed girl, who had been a victim of heavy bullets disguised in words. When asked for a reason, she couldn’t utter a word. She would look as if she were in immense pain. Everyone searched for a wound, but they couldn’t find anything.

The psychiatrist, Mr. Smith sighed and kept the tabloid from his hands. Skylie had been his patient for almost 3 months. Why? Well, you see Skylie wasn’t the perfect barbie-doll of our beauty standards. Having been born as a premature baby, she was skinny since her childhood. As she grew up, people started to scorn her figure. It wasn’t long before Skylie would walk down the street with her groceries and hear the loud whispers of people “looks just like a witch”, “so scrawny”, and “ugly”. That’s when she subconsciously started staring at her body for hours in front of the mirror, thinking if she really was so unacceptable. It started to take a toll on her health. She used to chew down huge plates of food until her stomach gave up and threw everything back up. She didn’t talk with her friends and relatives fearing they will give the same comment about how skinny she was. Soon, her parents started taking her to Mr. Smith every week. Nothing had worked and her eating disorders worsened.

Now, this was the final result—a girl who had lost her reason. The mean remarks swirled around in her mind making her hate herself. Skylie is just one of the many victims of our society’s cruelty. Often in life, we throw in negative comments about people but don’t realize the repercussion of those words. Is it righteous to poke fun at people for our own entertainment without any regard for their feelings? One thoughtless statement is enough to push someone down a bottomless pit of despair. Words are deadlier than swords.

While swords inflict physical wounds that you can patch up, thoughtless words can often stagger you deep enough to last a lifetime.

Mr. Smith’s closed his eyes, trying to comprehend what he just read in today’s newspaper. In big headlines, it was stated “Teenage girl commits suicide”. Skylie was dead, she couldn’t bear the load of all those heavy words thrown in her direction. It had been 3 months and she decided that it was enough, enough time to endure an unending scroll of rejection and criticism from everyone around her.

Worse still, a young girl’s death is only greeted by a blank wall of apathy, by people who can’t help but give worse comments about her. They neither stop nor change. The story of a girl truly undone.

On the other hand, words hold the power to share love and can make a person happy. If a negative statement can push someone down a bottomless pit of despair, a positive one can pull someone out of it. There’s always a double coincidence of words, and choice of ours alongside to make someone’s day great out of it. Imagine you started off the day with someone calling you “beautiful” and telling you how they cherish your presence. All of a sudden, all those walls of anxiety break down and throughout the day those words echo in your head, making you smile ear to ear. Even the melody of a single line can leave a huge impact on us.

It’s our responsibility to understand the weight our words carry and how they can impact the people around us. It’s up to us to use our words: a powerful weapon or an exalted conveyor of happiness.