Sticks and Stones is a dialectical audit of language as it relates to identity. Language can be harmful and healing. It creates a framework for us to understand each other but is often loaded with content from the projection of others. Assumptions, presumptions and ideals about who we are or who we might be based on tropes we learned and consumed creates the dissonance that leads to marginalization.

“Sticks and Stones may break my bones but words will never hurt”. Over the course of my lived experience as much as I may have wanted to believe this, I have learned that it is not accurate. Words hurt. They appear to be harmless… until you learn how they become the impetus for implicit bias and shape cultural ideas and narratives about who you might be. Words perpetuate the stigma of the “ism’s”.