She can get a chair; she can sit down and write. Facing the blank page. The blank page also faces her with freedom.
<...>
Stand with the woman by the table. Sit with the woman facing the blank page, or blank canvas. A space waiting for filling. These spaces are perfect. What is perfect terrifies.
<...>
The steam of tension evaporated. The moment passed. The fear, buried. It is easier like this. It is ordinary and safe. We hurry to fill in spaces with everydayness because spaces frighten us, but, the dividing line between fear and excitemnet is thin.
<...>
In bardic times, it was considered a great misfortune to have a poet in your family. But if the poet happened to be a woman, this was double misfortune, for she, as a woman, would have double the power. ... Magic surrounded the poet's power and this power was feared.

XLVI

A THOUGHT went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,—some way back,
I could not fix the year,
  
Nor where it went, nor why it came        
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.
  
But somewhere in my soul, I know
I ’ve met the thing before; 
It just reminded me—’t was all--
And came my way no more.

From Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924

Dickinson's poem about power of words - click "read more":​

Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, MA

There is a world out there and around us and then there is what we make of it. Words help navigate through the world by means of letting us name objects/events and in doing so face them. Experiencing something and being able to say  "this is [insert word]" is like dropping an anchor, like tying yourself to the world, like building a bridge. People often don't agree on what a word means : what's funny for one person might not be funny for somebody else. The mismatch, albeit confusing at times, also helps us make sense of the world -- helps notice differences , similarities, all sorts of interesting effects.

I like the idea of this secondary personal world that has the features of the actual world, yet different from it and unique. It's singularity arising not only from the unique combination of events/places one has encountered but also from the words that this person chooses to refer to them (= from the way he/she relates to those events).

This quote from The Joke by Milan Kundera led me to thinking that the personal world of words is not the only secondary world possible:
"Once more I was amazed by the incredible human capacity for transforming reality into a likeness of desires or ideas".

​A quote from The Confessions of St. Augustine.

Not one whit more easily are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and have no sober judge to whom we may appeal.