Day 2: What I talk about when I talk about kind words

When I was in high school, I was eaten up a lot by some insecurities back then: I wasn’t really confident about my appearance, I worried much because I wasn’t belong to the smartest group anymore like I was in junior high, I could only make few friends, and many more. Also as a type of person who sometimes takes things personally, I used to remember what other talks badly about me, and sometimes it made me saying rude things to myself because I felt that I had never been good enough. But then, there was one day when I received kind words from my friend, which I still remember until now. Those words sort of changing my life and made me believe the power of kind words.

At that time, while my classmates and I were decorating our class for a yearly school competition, one of my friends brought a camera and she did some documentation. She took some photos of us, sometimes taken candidly, sometimes with any instruction so we could smile to the camera. Then it came to my turn and she took my photo while smiling. A few moments later, she looked at the result and said…

“Wow, I don’t know but you have such an amazing smile!”

I suddenly wondered. Really? Did she really mean it? Because I never thought people would think that way of me, and I always believed that I’m not good looking enough: I was just a skinny girl, with dark skin, fluffy hair, and average height, with no interesting physical features at all. Yes, I always got a hard time to accept that fact and I couldn’t help blaming myself for things I couldn’t change. But when my friends said those words, and I heard she said it genuinely, it made my heart warm so I started to change my perspective towards myself.

Another thing about kind words that I still remember is from two years ago.

On that day, my class held such a ‘graduation party’ after we finished in-class training program in our office, and one of the agenda was writing a message anonymously to each other. There were about 30 messages each people received, and when I got to read their messages for me at night, I smiled. That was just too… kind?

I wasn’t really close to everyone but still, most of them wrote kind words to me, either their impressions or just messages that they wanted to share. How they reminded me to be a good one, or to smile more often, or how they wished me a good luck, made me realized that I was blessed to be surrounded by good people. Since it was sent anonymously, I believed that they wrote it sincerely even though we only knew each other for less than two months. (I forgot what I wrote to them, but hopefully it’s also a good one!)

After all, I started to think more positively about myself and that’s just explaining how big the impact of kind words is.

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” — Mother Teresa

So, let’s spread more kind words whenever we can. It will cost us nothing but we won’t know how it could change someone’s life! 🙂