It Does Not Fit What Happened

Every word that exists is either too big or too small.

The big ones do not fit. You have read them, at various points, and each time something in you has said no, that is not it, and the saying-no has not been denial, it has been accuracy. Those words describe something else, and you know because you have read the accounts of people to whom that something else happened and their accounts are not yours.

The small ones do not fit either. Every softer word makes it into a thing that would not have taken twenty years.

So you sit between two vocabularies, and neither has a place for you, and the effect of that has been very specific: you have never been able to say it, and you have never been able to look it up, and you have therefore never once found out that anybody else in the world has been where you were.

You were nineteen.

That is all this page is going to say about the event itself, because it is yours and it is not mine to characterize, and because the whole difficulty here is that other people's characterizations have been arriving for twenty years and none of them has fitted.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you what it was. I do not know, and if I guessed I would be doing to you the exact thing that twenty years of reading has been doing.

I am not going to tell you it was worse than you think, or that it was not as bad as you think. Both of those are somebody else's assessment of a thing they were not present at.

I am not going to press you to disclose it. You do not owe your history to anybody, and a page that makes disclosure the price of help is not offering help.

And I am not going to tell you whether it counts. That is the question underneath twenty years of reading and it is not one a stranger can answer, and I would not want you to accept an answer to it from a stranger.

What I will say is that people exist whose entire work is with experiences that do not fit the categories. A counselor who works with this, or one of the helplines that specializes in it, will not need you to have the right word before they can be useful. That is precisely the thing they are trained for.

You are not disqualified from being helped by not having a word. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and there is no requirement in it that the heart be able to classify what broke it, and the Holy Spirit is on that wall with somebody who has been reading other people's accounts for twenty years.

The verse keeps the thing itself

There is a line in Psalm 56 that is more useful here than anything else in the book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Look at what is being kept.

Not a report. Not a classification. My wanderings, which is a word for a route rather than an event, and my tears, which is the response rather than the cause.

There is no category anywhere in that verse. Nothing is being filed. What is described is somebody keeping the actual particulars of what a person went through, in the form they occurred, without turning them into a case.

And the bottle image is worth sitting with. It is a small, absurd, physical picture: somebody collecting tears as though they were valuable enough to keep, and the point of it is not efficiency, it is that they were not discarded.

That is the opposite of what every article has done to you. Each one has taken your twenty years and offered you a container that was the wrong shape.

You are not unrecorded for want of a category. 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 particulars rather than of a classification, and the Holy Spirit has held the actual thing rather than a version of it that fitted a word.

Why the words fail

Words for experiences are built out of typical cases. That is how language works and it is not a conspiracy: a word forms when enough instances resemble each other closely enough for one label to be useful.

Which means every word is a summary of a middle, and anything that sits at an edge has no word, and there are a great many edges.

Your twenty years have not been a failure to identify what happened. They have been a collision between a particular life and a vocabulary made of averages.

And there is a second, crueller effect. When somebody reads five descriptions and matches none of them, the conclusion available is not the words are inadequate. It is I am making it more than it was, because that is the interpretation the mind offers when there is no external confirmation.

That conclusion is not evidence. It is what happens to anybody who checks themselves against a set of categories they do not fit.

You are not exaggerating. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the heart is not stored in a category, and the Holy Spirit has never once required your experience to match a published description before He would take it seriously.

What is available

Not a name. I have refused to give one and I am not going to reverse that at the end.

One sentence, in your own words, said out loud to God, with no category attached to it.

Not I think it might have been. Not the closest available word. Your own description of what actually occurred and what it did, in the plainest words you have, however long or short and however badly it comes out. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 56:8, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

That is not a small thing. It will be the first time in twenty years that the event has existed outside your own head in its own shape rather than in somebody else's.

And then, if you can, take that same sentence to somebody trained. Not to be labeled. To be heard by a person who does not need it labeled first.

You are not required to categorize it before you bring it. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and pouring out has no shape requirement attached, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a version that matches something.