Compliments- What a power they have over us | Essay | Mental Health

Compliments are the things that lift your spirits and allow you to believe that for that very moment you and only you are the most important person.

A simple action, gesture or sentence can change the way you think or feel about yourself. It’s the simple things that elongate and stick in my mind as a constant reminder that I mean something to someone.

Compliments for me arouse a certain kind of happiness that I don’t forget for a long time and the most impactful one was not even an intentional compliment. It was just 9 small words said by a three-year-old boy. My baby cousin brother was someone who I spoke to every few days through facetime and even though he could not talk much, we communicated through our laughs and the Wi-Fi lag we experience. The distance between America and India became blurred when I spoke to him.

His muffled words and big smiles became a norm for me to experience every few days. It was more of just making sure he remembers my face since I am his sister after all. However, when he said to his mother that, I was not his sister but his friend, changed our entire relationship. Even though we did nothing that I would do with my friends or he would do with his. I was immediately caught off guard, and I realised that now for him I was more than just another sister he has to know but someone who he will want to talk to. Although it wasn’t much and it was only a few words, those stuck with me.

These words make me smile every time I thought about them and I made sure to call him every alternate day if not every day.

Those words to him maybe could have been just an expression or they could have been a burst of affection. But, to me it was in the list of things that I refer to in my long-life book of memory that I use to feel better at any given time. It may not have changed my life and it may not have changed the elder sisterly actions I do but it definitely changed the place he held in my heart and it changed the confidence I had to shape and affect someone else’s life.