If People Ate Dictionaries

I've never actually been to therapy. But I imagine myself there sometimes — someone asks me how I feel, and I just don't know where to begin. I don't have the words for what I've been through. I'm not even sure the words exist.

And I don't think I'm alone in that.

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That's the thing about feelings — we assume they're hard to name because they're complicated. But I don't think that's it. I think feelings are actually incredibly specific. It's language that can't keep up sometimes. It rounds you down to the nearest available word and hopes it lands close enough.

We've had centuries to get this right. Poems, letters, words passed between people in the dark, sent across oceans, carved into walls — all of it reaching toward the same thing.

Tell me what's going on inside that head of yours.

And still, we come up short.

We say we love someone, but the word only carries part of it. The rest gets left behind — like a remainder in long division. The word holds some of the weight, while the rest stays uncaptured. And we just learn to live with that, because there's nothing else to reach for.

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Some feelings have lived inside people their whole lives without ever being named once.

So we reach for images instead. We say heavy when we mean grief. We say hollow when the sadness has been so constant that it starts to feel like something was physically removed. We say "it's fine" when what we mean is that we've just stopped expecting anything different. None of that is actually true. It's just the closest we can get.

Sometimes, even the images don't come close to the truth. We say "I don't know" or "I just feel off." And the person across from us nods, because they have their own version of those feelings they can't label either. Over time, that becomes its own kind of understanding. The inability to explain stops being a wall and starts being something you share.

People say they've never had an original thought. The same is true for feelings. No matter what sequence of events has led you to where you are and what you feel, you will find people who say, “I know what you mean”.

And that might be one of the most relieving sentences in the world.

Language, ultimately, becomes less about translation and more about the quality of your company. Less of “here is exactly what I mean” and more of “I am reaching toward something, and I see you are too”.

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If you ate a dictionary — every page, every word, cross-referenced and alphabetized and ready — you would still stand in front of someone you care about and feel a gap between what's happening inside you and what your mouth lets out.

That gap doesn't close. But it gets smaller with people who want to understand you the way you want to understand them. You say what you can. You hold onto what you can't. You trust that some of it crosses through the silence anyway. And strangely, that silence ends up saying more than any word you could have found. Because by the time you've run out of language, what's left is just you — and sometimes that's the most honest thing you can offer someone.

find a way to speak to my soul, or leave me alone.

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