What I Cannot Say

Not Everything Unspoken is Unconscious

The Sea Turtle, digital painting by Judith Alalu, 2024

This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life. I’m not here to talk about why. I’m here to share what I can as I work through it. I’m feeling so much right now and I’m more aware than ever of the edge that exists for me both in terms of metabolizing my own experience and in terms of what I want to share. I’m really vulnerable here and write honestly and openly about my feelings and struggles in a way that feels increasingly important to me.

The more I write, the more I feel like my mission is to continue naming the things that often go unspoken. I experience it as a different kind of advocacy, which means shining a light on all the dark corners, saying that this too exists and is important to talk about. Things that are real and exist in an incredibly complex web that do not define my existence, but certainly contribute significant weight to my experience and to other people’s as well.

Back to my initial point though. I’m writing this now because I have the deepest darkest ache in the pit of my stomach. I’m writing right now in part with the desire that I can find some loophole that will bring me some relief. What I’m experiencing is very much bound up with the muscular dystrophy, with limitations and loss, with having to live with things that I would not be choosing for myself, with continuing to be faced with a kind of forced acceptance way before I’m able to choose acceptance myself. The fact that I know that my limitations are only going to increase makes it feel like there’s a giant lead weight on top adding more pressure. There’s more to hold and assimilate now and there’s more on the horizon.

I’ve been reminding myself lately that I don’t actually know what’s possible ahead, only that today is already enough to hold without attempting to see into a future I haven’t lived yet. That’s not optimism. I don’t know if things get easier or worse. I just know that guessing at tomorrow while today is already this heavy adds its own layer of harm, and I’m trying, badly some days, to stop doing that particular thing to myself.

I know each and every one of us has an edge where we bump up against and know that for whatever reasons, this is forbidden territory. What do we do with that forbidden territory when it’s not just forbidden to write about, but feels forbidden to talk about? What do we do when it’s forbidden to even think about, when the private, unspoken version of the thought already feels threatening? If it feels forbidden to share, it will inevitably feel dangerous to even think and feel. Where does a feeling go when there’s no sanctioned place to put it?

You have an edge too, and it’s probably shaped by something completely different than mine like a want or a desire you’re ashamed of, thoughts or feelings you can’t express. The specifics don’t matter as much as the shape. We’re not sitting at the same edge. We’re sitting at our own edges, close enough to see each other.

I’m imagining you reading this and locating your own edge and joining me so we’re all sitting at the edge together. The content is different for each of us, but we all look to each other with knowing glances about what it means to be at the boundary.

A friend told me recently that I sounded like I was at the edge of being able to hold the whole thing, at the threshold where there’s nothing left to grab onto. That’s another way to describe why this has been one of the hardest weeks in my life.

We all have layered internal worlds. The top layers are the things we know about and choose to share. The next layers are the things we know about and choose not to share. The layers beneath that are things we come in contact with and know exist, but they aren’t fully formed, and they certainly aren’t shared. The layers below that live in the dark ocean bottom where the sunlight does not reach, in our unconscious. Little speckles may leak through into the layers above, but they’re mysterious and we aren’t able to name them.

Writing this down feels a little like taking a stool softener. Something that was stuck is moving, that’s all. It doesn’t undo the fact that I’m hurting right now, and it isn’t going to. I don’t know if that counts as relief or just as motion. They can be the same thing sometimes.

Another thing I know intimately is that retelling the story doesn’t always bring relief. Sometimes it just re-grooves the same track, the same channel of pain running the same direction. I thought about that while writing every paragraph here. Is naming this edge, without naming what’s on the other side of it, actually giving me room, or is it just another way of grinding the groove deeper, dressed up as insight because I’m the one narrating? I don’t have a clear answer. Some days writing moves something meaningfully and other days I think I’m performing relief for an audience so I don’t have to sit alone with the fact that there isn’t any.

Earlier this week, there was a moment when the pain felt unbearable to me right before a session with a client. Then I was immersed in the stories he was telling me, entertaining ones, and I was laughing, in awe of how much he’s lived through and suffered and where he’s ended up. I wish I could share some of them here, but they belong to yet another layer of the unspoken, the therapist’s lockbox. Forty-five minutes went by and when the session ended, the pain of my own suffering felt significantly lighter, momentarily anyway.

I have no idea what’s going to happen with the circumstances that are causing me pain. I can’t think my way to an exit, and I’ve stopped expecting to find one. But I know that my experience of the pain moves, that it isn’t the giant lead weight I described earlier in this piece, some static leaden lump sitting unchanged in the same spot all day. That alone is relieving. The weight isn’t gone, but it isn’t a fixed thing either.

I’ve also paid a lot of attention to how I relate to it. When I can consciously submit to the pain instead of resisting it, when I stop trying to think my way out of circumstances I can’t think my way out of, I feel some relief. When I resist it, or try to fix it, I feel worse. I understand that resisting the pain adds a second pain on top of the first, and submitting to it doesn’t. Understanding that doesn’t make the first pain go away, and it isn’t the same as believing any of this is going to get better.

How is it for you? Is it easy to find your edge?