I Am Looking for the Name of It

You are not searching a symptom. You are searching for a word.

Since about March there has been something. Not sadness, exactly, and you have discounted several names on those grounds. Not anxiety in the way people describe anxiety, because you are not frightened of anything in particular and your chest is fine.

It is more like the volume has come down on everything. Food is food. Music is fine. You laughed at something on Tuesday and it was a real laugh and it went out like a match.

You have been going through descriptions for weeks, at night, matching yourself against them the way somebody matches a rash to a picture.

Some of them fit at one edge and not at the other. You have found four names that are close and none that is right, and every near miss has left you slightly less able to describe it than before, because now you are describing it in borrowed vocabulary.

And here is what you are actually after, and it is worth saying plainly.

You want the name because a named thing is real. It has edges. It can be told to somebody. Without a name this is just you, being like this, since March, for no reason anybody would accept.

That is what the searching is for. It is not diagnosis. It is permission.

What this page will not do

I am not going to name it. I have not met you, I am not qualified, and the naming of this kind of thing is done by a person in a room over more than one conversation, not by a page.

I am going to be direct about the useful part. Go to your doctor. Say the three things you know: it started around March, this is what has changed, and it has not lifted. That is a complete and genuinely useful account and it is more than most people manage.

You do not need a name to go. That is the thing that has been keeping you out of that room: a belief that you have to arrive with the thing already identified or you are wasting their time. You are not. Working out what it is happens to be their job. Scripture settles that in Psalm 139:11-12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

And if there is ever a point where you are thinking about not being here, say that to somebody today, and there is a crisis line in your country that exists for exactly that call.

You are not required to arrive with a diagnosis. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not require the heart to be able to explain itself first, and the Holy Spirit is on that window seat at midnight with somebody who cannot say what is wrong.

The verse is about a place the dark does not work

There is a passage in Psalm 139 that is written by somebody trying to hide and finding they cannot.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11-12

Read it as a description rather than a threat, because that is how it is written.

He is imagining that the dark might hide him. And the answer that comes back is that darkness is not a category God works in: to Him it is not dim, not partial, not obscure. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

Now bring that to what you are carrying. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 139:11-12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

You cannot see this thing. That is your whole difficulty; it has no shape, no name, no edges, and you have been trying to bring a torch to it for four months and the torch keeps landing on the wrong thing. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 139:11-12, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

This verse says there is somebody for whom it is not dark. Not somebody who will explain it to you tonight, and not somebody who is going to hand you the word. Somebody who is looking at it already, in full light, and does not need you to describe it first.

You are not unseen because you cannot describe it. Scripture says the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day, Psalm 139:12, and the seeing is described as unaffected by the conditions rather than helped by explanation, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to find the word before He knows what this is.

Why the near misses hurt

Here is why four months of searching has made you less articulate rather than more, and it is not your fault.

Every description you read is written for the general case. It has to be; that is what a description is. So it will fit you in some places and not in others, and the parts that do not fit will feel like disqualification.

And each time that happens, something subtle occurs: you start editing your own account to fit the categories you have read. The thing you are experiencing gets translated into somebody else's vocabulary, and after four months of that you can no longer say plainly what it is actually like, because the plain version has been overwritten. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 139:11-12, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

That is why your description has got worse.

The way back is not another article. It is to say it in your own words to somebody, badly, without matching it to anything. Since March the volume has come down on everything. That sentence is worth more in a consulting room than any of the four names you have found, because it is actually about you.

You are not required to translate yourself before you can be helped. Scripture says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, Matthew 12:34, and the direction is from the inside outward rather than from a category inward, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to speak in borrowed vocabulary.

What a name would and would not give you

A name is genuinely useful. It unlocks treatment, it tells clinicians what has worked for other people, and it can be told to an employer.

It does not make the thing real. The thing is already real. It has been real since March, in you, at full weight, whether or not any word has been attached to it.

That is the part worth taking to bed. You have been waiting for a label to authorize your own experience, and experience does not work that way and never has. Somebody in 1850 with exactly what you have had it just as much as somebody today with a term for it. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 139:11-12, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

And notice who else it does not need to convince. Not God. He does not work from the categories, and He has not been waiting since March to find out whether this qualifies.

You are not unreal without a word for it. Scripture says thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book, Psalm 56:8, and the keeping is of the thing itself rather than of an approved description of it, and the Holy Spirit has been holding something that has never once been named.