I love words, definitions, names, names of things and naming things.

When we are born, a vernacular is selected to identify the specific human body and soul bag within a tiny human that 2 people created.
This is mine.

“Tiff” A petty quarrel. Usually small. Often between people who care about each other.
“Petty” means something unimportant, trivial. Minor. Lesser.

Cool. On paper and out loud, my given name is…not the best.

It’s who I am, if I let it be who I am. Just like everything else, we can allow everything we see and experience to be a part of the golden-corral buffet of being that this world offers us. The options are overwhelming, but for some reason, we aren’t overwhelmed by options anymore. More seems to never be a bad idea, but I’m not so sure.

I don’t remember much of my childhood, my tiny human experience. From birth to seventeen, I lived in many homes, across countless cities and states. But I’m not writing this to add to the already oversaturated market of made-for-TV trauma stories for people to binge, gasp at, cry over, consume, and escape with.

True and terrible experiences consumed for entertainment are so off-putting to me. It’s wild how normalized fantastical trauma has become.

Our lives are stalled and stilled with screens, our fullness stifled by easily-accessed escape. Replication seems to always win out over creation and participation. Mass consumption beats individual contribution daily. To me, that’s a clearer definition of petty.

We’re all more than what we stare at;
We are all spread too dim.

Everyone is born into some kind of chaos, our collective chaos, and everyone has a chance to uncover their preexisting worth through the fray. I get pumped thinking about how powerful it is to choose to believe that your experiences matter, especially when parts of your past insist that they don’t – or that you should forget them.

A watch is not a map. Stop tick-tocking your days away (pun-intended), waiting on what’s next. What’s more. What’s better. What will keep you distracted and empty.

What’s better than the life, the person, and the experiences you’re looking away from? Why? It seems anything will do, as long as it’s not you.

So what do we fill our days with when we aren’t stuck in front of a screen?
A friend snuck this note over to me recently.

She didn’t say thanks for being perfect, for righting a lifetime of wrongs, for watching the season finale with her, or for fixing everything broken in me and everyone else. She said Thank you for paying attention.

That’s the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

That’s language redefined: A petty identity wholly repurposed.

A flawed fullness.