The Thing I Will Not Type

You have got as far as the box about eleven times and you have never typed it.

Not because you do not know the words. You know exactly the words. You have composed the sentence in your head at various hours and it is about nine words long and it is entirely clear.

You will not put it in, because of what you believe would happen if you did.

Not that somebody would see it. That is not the fear. It is something much more primitive than that, and you know how it sounds, which is why you have not said it to anybody either.

It is that typing it would make it a thing that exists.

At the moment it is a shape in your own head about your own head, and as long as it stays there it is not quite real. The moment it goes into a box, or into a sentence spoken out loud, it becomes an object with a name that other people also use, and then it is out and it cannot be got back in.

So it has been in there, unpursued, for about seven months.

And that is a strange and lonely place to be, because you have not been able to find out whether you are right, and you have also not been able to stop wondering, and the not-finding-out is not the same as it not being there.

Before anything else

If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, tell somebody today. In the UK the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, any hour. Wherever you are, there is a crisis line, and your emergency number will get you to help. If you are in immediate danger, go to an emergency department. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 139:23-24, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

That is said whether or not it is your situation, because this is a page about a fear concerning your own mind, and it would be irresponsible to write one without putting that at the top.

And the second thing, which is the whole practical content of this page: make an appointment. This week.

You do not have to arrive with a name. You do not have to know what it is. You can say exactly what you have said in your own head: there is something about how my mind is working that frightens me and I have not been able to look it up. That is a complete and useful account and they will take it from there.

You are not being melodramatic by making that call. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not withheld from somebody who cannot say what is wrong, and the Holy Spirit is in that lamplit room with a woman who has got as far as the box eleven times.

The verse is a request to be looked through

There is a prayer at the end of Psalm 139 that is exactly the opposite of what you have been doing for seven months. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 139:23-24, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.Psalm 139:23-24

Know my thoughts.

That is the region you have kept sealed, and here is somebody inviting inspection of it, deliberately, in a prayer. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 139:23-24, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

And notice that you can only invite that from somebody you are certain about. Nobody asks to be gone through by a person they are afraid of, which means the whole prayer rests on what has been established in the hundred and twenty-two verses before it: that this is the God who made him, who knows every word before he says it, and who is present in every place he could go. Scripture already said it in Psalm 139:23-24, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

He asks to be searched because he already knows how the searcher feels about him.

That is what is available to you and it is different from what you have been imagining. You have been afraid of the thing becoming known. In this verse, being known is the request rather than the danger.

You are not in danger of being found out. Scripture says search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts, Psalm 139:23, and it is asked of somebody the writer has spent the whole psalm establishing as safe, and the Holy Spirit is not conducting an investigation that will end badly for you.

The belief that has kept you alone

Say it plainly, because it will not survive daylight as well as it survives midnight.

If I do not name it, it is not quite real.

That is what has been operating for seven months, and it is not stupid. It is a very old human instinct and it is why people avoid opening letters and why nobody wants to say a diagnosis out loud in a hospital corridor.

But it does not work, and you have seven months of evidence. The thing has not been smaller for being unnamed. It has been unexamined, which is different, and it has had the whole of your head to itself. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 139:23-24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

And there is a cost that is not obvious. Because it is unnamed, it has no edges, which means it can be anything, and at four in the morning it is the worst version.

A named thing has limits. That is not a small consolation; it is the main practical difference between a fear that has been looked at and one that has not.

You are not making it real by looking at it. Scripture says the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day, Psalm 139:12, and the thing has been fully visible to Him for seven months whether or not it has been visible to you, and the Holy Spirit is not learning anything new when it is finally said.

What to do with the box

Not type it in.

That is not what I am going to tell you to do, and I want to be exact about why. A search box will give you the general case, at whatever hour you use it, with no one to interpret it, and for a fear about your own mind that is one of the least helpful things available. You have been protecting yourself from something worth being protected from. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 139:23-24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

The instinct was sound. The conclusion was wrong.

What you should do with those nine words is say them to a person whose job it is. Not to a box.

Say them out loud to God first, tonight, exactly as they are, because that is a rehearsal and because it puts them outside your own head for the first time in seven months.

Then say them to a doctor this week.

You are not required to face this alone or to look it up alone. Scripture says two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor... and if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, and the good is located in there being a second person, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a room where somebody says out loud what they have kept in.