I Stopped Mentioning It

Every article on this site starts here, and this one is no different. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If this is where you are, the useful part of this page is a phone call, and I would rather you made it before the end than after.

Now. Somebody asked how you were today, and you said good.

You said it lightly, in the ordinary way, and you moved the conversation along before there was any risk of it settling anywhere. You have got quite skilled at that. There is a whole set of small moves: the quick answer, the question back, the joke, the topic change.

And the strange result is that you can spend a whole evening in a room full of people who love you and come home having been entirely alone in it, because not one person in that room got anything true.

That is not their fault and it is not a failure in them. They asked. It is just that the answer has been edited for so long that the editing happens before you notice it happening.

Something was audible without being said

There is a line in one of the psalms that I find genuinely startling, because of what it assumes.

Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee. (Psalm 38:9, King James Version)

My groaning is not hid from thee. He does not say I have told you about it. He says it is not hidden, which is a different claim entirely.

The groaning in that verse is the part that was never spoken. It is the sound underneath the words, the part that does not get said at a dinner table, and the psalm says it arrives anyway.

You are heard in the part of this you have never said out loud. Psalm 38:9 has the unspoken sound arrive without being sent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody stop feeling unheard in a room full of people.

I would not put that in front of you as a substitute for telling somebody. It is not one. But on the specific ache of having gone quiet, it is exactly the right sentence: the silence has not been total. It only looked total from inside.

You have never once been completely unheard, even in the months when nothing was said. The Spirit of God is the one who hears what was not spoken at a table, and it is written that the groaning was not hid, which is said about the unspoken part specifically.

Why the editing started, and what it costs

Let me be practical about the mechanism, because I think the shame around it is misplaced.

Nobody decides to stop being honest. What happens is that a true answer produces a particular reaction, three or four times, and the reaction is exhausting. People get concerned. People want to help and cannot. People say a thing that was meant kindly and lands badly, and then you have to look after them about it.

So the editing starts as a kindness to everybody, including you, and it works, right up until it is the only setting left.

You are not dishonest, and the editing has never once been deceit. Psalm 38:9 distinguishes between what gets said and what is actually going on, without any suggestion that the gap is a moral failure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the guilt out of a habit somebody fell into.

And here is the cost, plainly. The people who could do something about this have never been given the true version either. Not friends. Somebody qualified. The editing does not stop at the dinner table, and that is where it becomes dangerous rather than sad.

You were never meant to hold a full description alone, and no household has ever once been improved by it. The Spirit of God is the one who gets an unedited sentence out of somebody's mouth, and what is written puts the desire and the groaning both before God and keeps neither one back.

The plain routing, and the unedited version goes here

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort. On an article about going quiet, it is the whole of the point.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and there is no tidy way to say it and no need for one. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And whatever you have been editing out of every answer for months goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, in the full version, with the length attached.

You are permitted to give somebody the unedited account, and nobody has ever once been burdened by it. Psalm 38:9 puts the whole of it, spoken and unspoken, in front of God without trimming, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from the edited answer to the real one.

If saying it is hard, write it down first. A lot of people find the mouth will not do it but the hand will, and reading a page out loud is easier than composing one in a chair.

You have more than one way to hand this over, and the passage has never once specified the method. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody reading their own handwriting to a stranger, and what is written names the unspoken part as something that arrives regardless.