Growing up with my mother meant living with two truths at once.

 

In public, she was a force. Bold. Brilliant in ways I still don’t entirely understand. Always put together, hair styled, big gold hoops, and the kind of effortless glamour that made it look like the world had arranged itself around her. (She would be so disappointed in the klutzy, laughably unfashionable woman I’ve become.)

 

At home, however, that same polish had a sharp edge. 

 

Our days ran on her moods, and I learned to read them the way we learn to read weather: by light, by pressure. I could tell what kind of evening it would be by the way she moved through the doorway, by how she put her purse down, by whether she spoke right away or let silence do it first, by how quickly she reached for a drink. 

 

I didn’t have language for any of it. 

 

But I learned quickly that the wrong timing, the wrong question, the wrong tone could turn an ordinary moment into a long night. She had a way of shrouding a room in complete darkness in the blink of an eye, even if the sun was still shining brightly outside. 

 

So I became a student of her rhythms: when to talk, when to wait, when to go to my room and make myself quiet. I didn’t think of this as fear back then. 

 

It was simply the price of living with someone extraordinary and injured in the same body.

 

We came together through music, though. 

Her career was words (editing, writing, and an enviable life that moved through serious rooms, including the White House), but music was how she moved through the world. Classical was her first language. And in our home, just the two of us, fraught as it was, music made the place feel briefly habitable.

 

Our life together had a constant soundtrack. Mozart, Beethoven, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, The Doors, Mamas and the Papas, and, of course, the one and only Patsy Cline.

 

For those of you who don’t know her, Patsy Cline is a Virginia-born, legendary country singer from the 1950s who died tragically young in a plane crash in 1963. But her voice (clean, steady, smooth, rich) taught me how to fall in love and speak to a broken heart without begging for pity. 

 

 

 

Patsy Cline is a masterclass in saying the most with the least. She chased clarity over cleverness, trusting she didn’t need big words to make her big emotions real. She could walk straight into the center of a feeling with plain words and leave you there gut-punched, doubled over in undeniable truth.

 

For example, let’s look at the lyrics for She’s Got You, one of the most heart-rending songs about sitting in the aftermath of a breakup ever written:

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s 2:58 minutes of calm, resigned heartbreak that sinks into your bones. She never screams or cries. She doesn’t speak of betrayal or revenge. 

 

Instead, she builds a case in a quiet courtroom of her grief, sharing the evidence of all she has left: artifacts of love, in the past tense.

 

But here’s what’s crazy about this song. 

 

The lyrics are wildly simple:

Also, the structure of the three verses (one of which repeats) follow the exact same blueprint:

 

 

Lather, rinse, repeat. 

 

That's literally the whole song. 

 

We think impact comes from vocabulary. From proving we’re smart enough to deserve the feeling we’re trying to name. So we hoard words we’d never use in real life. We edit the life out of our sentences. We keep waiting until we sound like someone who’s already been canonized.

 

Meanwhile, Patsy Cline is over here with 55 unique words and a song that can flatten a grown adult in under three minutes.

 

You think the only way to be taken seriously is to sound polished, profound, untouchable? You're wrong. 

 

People don’t get moved by perfect phrasing. They get moved by clarity and intent. By the moment you stop performing and simply tell the truth in the language you actually use. 

 

You don’t need the poetic chops of Byron or the literary brute force of Hemingway for someone to hear you and be moved by you.

 

Of course, that can be scary all on its own, right? Good words or no good words, speaking can sometimes feel like a liability.

 

Because the moment you say the real thing, you can’t pretend you didn’t. You can’t keep it safely theoretical. You can’t keep a relationship or situation in the place where everything is implied and nothing is on record. Saying it changes the room. It changes what someone can claim they “didn’t know.”

 

That’s true. And it’s also why you keep waiting for “better” words: you think if the sentence is perfect, the risk goes down.

 

It doesn’t.

 

But when you want something badly enough, the risk doesn't matter. The juice is worth the proverbial squeeze, in the long run.

 

 

They use common words. They don’t hide. They don’t try to be impressive. They tell the truth and get said out loud, while it still matters.

 

 

Stop making your held tongue about talent. 

 

You don’t need to earn the right to be understood. You don’t need a bigger lexicon. You don’t need a thesaurus. You don’t need to sound like anyone else.

 

You already have what Patsy Cline had:

 

 

So pick one true sentence you can stand behind today and say it out loud. Simple. Unpolished. Honest. Yours. 

 

Then say the next one. 

 

And then the next one.