I Do Not Want to Make a Fuss

Every page on this site begins with this and I am glad of it. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page ever takes the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If this is your situation, the useful part of this page is a phone call. Make it before you finish reading, not after.

Now. You were raised well.

That is not sarcasm. You were, and it shows, and it is one of the nicest things about you. You were taught not to take up room, not to be difficult, not to be the one everybody has to work around.

And every one of those lessons was given to you in love by people who wanted you to be easy to be around, and every one of them worked.

The trouble is that those lessons do not come with an off switch for the one occasion in a life when being difficult is exactly the right thing to be. And so here you are, months into something, running the same manners you were taught at nine years old in a situation they were never designed for.

A whole crowd told him to be quiet

There is a scene on a road out of Jericho that I love for one reason: the crowd is wrong and the loud man is right.

And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou son of David, have mercy on me. (Luke 18:39, King James Version)

Read the crowd's position. They are not villains. They are the polite people. They are the ones who understand what is appropriate, and they have decided that a man shouting is not.

And he does not lower his voice out of respect. He cried so much the more, which is a phrase I find genuinely funny and completely serious at the same time.

You are allowed to get louder rather than quieter, and volume has never once been a failure of manners in a situation like this. Luke 18:39 has the crowd rebuke the shouting and the shouting increase anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a well brought up woman raise her voice.

And notice who the crowd is. Not enemies. Fellow travelers. Good people with good instincts about what is seemly, entirely wrong about this one moment.

You have been listening to a crowd that is sincere and has never once been correct about this. The Spirit of God is the one who separates good manners from good judgment, and it is written that he cried so much the more, which the passage records without a word of criticism.

Politeness has a specific cost here

Let me be practical, because on this site the practical part is the point.

Here is what being no trouble actually does in a room with somebody qualified in it. It shrinks the description. A woman raised like that does not lie, but she rounds down. She says a bit of a thing. She offers the reassurance herself before anybody has asked her for it. She apologizes for taking the slot.

And the person listening is working from what they are given. A rounded down description produces a rounded down response, and then she goes home thinking it must not have been much.

You are handing over a smaller version and receiving a smaller answer, and no clinician has ever once been able to work from what was left out. Luke 18:39 has a man refuse to give a smaller version in a crowd that wanted one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody to say the whole thing at full size.

And the apologizing. I would take that out entirely. Every apology in that room takes up more of the appointment than the thing you are apologizing for.

You were never a nuisance in that building, and being brought up well has never once obliged you to be inaudible. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a full description out of somebody who has been giving out a summary, and what is written has a man ignore an entire crowd of polite people and be commended for it.

The plain routing, said at full volume

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort. For a woman raised like that, this is the paragraph to underline.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and there is no such thing as making a fuss with that number. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And the thing you have been rounding down for months goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, at full size, with no apology in front of it and no it is probably nothing on the end.

You are permitted to take up the whole of the time that was allotted to you. Luke 18:39 has somebody refuse to be quieted by people who genuinely thought they were keeping order, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a polite person from summarizing to describing.

And if they seem busy, say it anyway. Busy is not the same as unwilling, and reading a room is the skill that has been costing you.

You have a whole description to give and it has never once needed to be trimmed for anybody's convenience. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman saying more than she is comfortable saying, and what is written records the louder version as the one that got answered.