Purely Personal, With Love

And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself,

because I could find no language to describe them in.

— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

There was a time when I could carve an image of emotion from words, when I could make hurts burn in the retelling, when I could use half a hundred descriptors to reproduce anguish in vivid immediacy. I made sense of feeling through words, using the medium of language to quantify and preserve the sinking of despair, the dizzying effects of pain, the blinding grief of a broken soul. I wrote my heart onto the page and left it there, content to wrangle words until they accurately reflected what I saw in myself, and those words once written were my lifeline to help, my reaching hand, at once the acknowledgement of inner turmoil and the begging for relief. And relief was proffered.

Relief came and choices followed, and more choices. I grounded in the place where I now stand, both physically and mentally. The world stopped spinning and I felt solid earth beneath me.

And I found that words were spent.

Oh, it isn't that I can't write pages of introspective rambling. It isn't that I can no longer over-analyse, over-dramatise, over-obsess, over-demand; it isn't that I've lost my way on the blank page and am roaming in blinding white, afraid to put down inky landmarks and build a black landscape around me. It isn't that at all.

It is only that somewhere along the way I lost the ability to transfer myself to paper, to re-create myself with words until I knew what I was, who I was, what I was thinking and feeling. It is not enough to say I'm terrified, can you help? or my heart is aching so much I can't take it anymore. It is not enough, because I know by now that those words spoken barely brush the depth of what is being felt; they do so little to adequately express legitimate inner need and unshakable fear that they are not even worth the breath used to speak them or the ink used to write them.

I don't know what to say. There is nothing to say. The force of the effort behind the murmured "I'm sad", acknowledged with a brief, unseeing glance and swiftly forgotten, is more than all of the energy spewed in paragraphs of extensive personal narration; the inarticulate whisper that dies before it reaches the air says more than any of my cries for help ever held. The tragedy was never in the screaming, the flailing, the nights spent rambling about anything and everything; it is in the silence now.

It is in the absence of words that bitterness is most keenly felt, because when words can be employed there is at least the comfort of a hollow diatribe against whatever fate drives the world, or perhaps the salve of a fantasy well-spun to set pain in a different light. In silence there is nothing of the sort. The emptiness spawns its own sort of grief.

That grief is gripping me now.

I am sad.

And yet even that is only a fraction of actual fact. Last night, after hours of wrestling through the dark and the silence and the aloneness, one fragment of a piecemeal dream brought a subconscious reminder of warmth and safety, and for a moment reassurance and contentment replaced the gnawing ache. As words elude me and my pen runs dry, it is not sadness alone that has hold of my soul.