Now That I Have the Words

My nine-year-old told me the other night, matter of factly, that a certain worry was "sitting in their stomach." Not upset about it. Not asking me to fix it. Just naming it, the way you would name the weather.

I sat with that long after bedtime. Because at nine, I did not have those words. I am not sure I had them at twenty-nine.

I come from a line of people who did not say the thing. My elders carried what they carried in silence, the way you carry something heavy and never once mention that your arms are tired. I think they believed that was strength. A quiet, uncomplaining, almost martyr kind of love. And the generation of girls I grew up in did not do much better. We felt everything and named none of it. We just coped, and called it being fine.

So it undoes me a little, in the best way, to watch the young ones now. I spent years as a high school counselor, and I am raising a nine-year-old, and this generation has language for the inside of themselves that we were never handed. They know the feeling behind the words. I have been learning it from them. Late, and on purpose.

For a while, naming felt like the whole answer. I finally had words for the tired that sleep does not fix, for the pull in two directions, for the in-between I kept trying to rush my way out of. And naming helped. It really did. Sometimes, before anything can shift, we do need to say the thing out loud.

But I have to be honest about something I noticed in myself.

Naming can quietly become a place to hide.

I could say the true thing. I just did not want to feel it.

Because the moment you actually name it, it stops being an idea in your head. It drops into your body. A tightness in the chest. A breath you do not finish. A sudden sting behind your eyes. And that, the feeling of it, is the very thing we back away from. So we stay up in the word, where it is safer, and we tell ourselves the naming was enough.

What finally made me turn toward it was losing my mom. She was sick for three years, and then she was gone, just over five years ago. After that, I could not unsee it. My parents were no longer the fixed, unshakeable strength I had always leaned on. They were people, getting older, on a timeline I had never once thought to fold into my own.

Now I watch my dad, and my bonus dad, and I notice the things I used to look right past. And I am an only child. In this whole story, I am the line that runs through all of it. There are people who love them. I am the one who is here, witnessing and listening.

That is a great deal to hold in silence. So I have decided not to.

That is really what I want to say to you, and it is why these reflections are changing. We do not have to carry this the way our elders did, wordless and alone, mistaking silence for strength. And naming it quietly to ourselves is only ever half of the way through.

The other half is being witnessed. The first time I said a true, heavy thing out loud to another woman, and instead of trying to fix me she simply said, "yes, me too, I have stood there," something in me finally let go. That is the difference. Not fixed. Witnessed.

So I am not writing to you from the far side of any of this. I am in the middle of it, the same middle you are in. I am just saying the thing out loud first, so that you can say, quietly, me too.

Something to sit with

Naming can feel like the whole job. You find the word, you say it, and part of you thinks, good, I have acknowledged it, I can set it down now. But naming a thing and turning toward it are not the same. So here is the gentle question underneath this one.

When you name the hard thing, what happens in the rest of you?

And is that feeling part of what makes you look away?

You do not have to do anything with the answer today. You do not need a plan. Just let yourself notice what your body already knows.

These reflections will each stand on their own now, so wherever you are on the day you find one, it can meet you there. If you would like to keep walking this together, you can join the email list below. I will keep saying the true things out loud, so that neither of us has to hold them in silence.

So I will leave you with the question I am still learning to answer myself.

What have you been carrying quietly that no one ever told you that you were allowed to say out loud?