I Used to Feel Everything

She used to be embarrassed by it.

That is the honest version and she would say it that way. In her twenties and thirties she would feel God so strongly and so easily that she had to manage it in public. She cried at things nobody else cried at. There were mornings in her own kitchen that she has never described to anybody because there is no way to describe them that does not sound like a claim.

It was not something she worked up. It arrived. That was simply how it went for about twenty years.

Fourteen months ago it stopped.

Not gradually. She could give you the season. And since then there has been nothing, in a way she finds difficult to convey to people who assume she means she is going through a hard time.

She is not going through a hard time. Her life is unusually settled. Her health is fine. Nothing happened.

What she has concluded, and has said to nobody, is the thing that keeps her awake, and it is not that God has left. She would not say that and she does not think it. It is worse and quieter than that.

She thinks something in her broke. That the apparatus she used to receive with has gone, and that she is now a person who has the memory of a thing and no access to it, and that this may be permanent.

The sentence, unsaid: I do not think He went anywhere. I think I stopped working.

You may know that silence. Nothing wrong in the circumstances, and the instrument gone quiet.

The psalm never says it got better

There is a psalm that people quote at the flat, and almost nobody notices what it does not do.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.Psalm 42:5

Read the mechanics of that sentence. A man is talking to his own soul, in the second person, asking it a question and then instructing it. That is a strange thing to do and it is worth noticing that God let it into the book.

And here is what the psalm does not contain. There is no verse where the soul answers. There is no line reporting that the cast down feeling lifted. He says the same thing again a few verses later, almost word for word, which tells you the first attempt did not fix it, and then the psalm ends.

You are inside a psalm that never reports a change, and Psalm 42:5 has a man instruct his own soul twice with no result recorded anywhere in the text, and it is the Spirit of God who takes an unresolved song and lands it on a woman who used to feel everything.

Hope is not a feeling in that sentence

Consider what he actually tells his soul to do, because it is not what a modern reader assumes.

Hope thou in God. In the Hebrew that is closer to wait for, to expect, to lean the weight of the thing onto somebody. It is a posture rather than a sensation, which is exactly why he can command it. Nobody can command a feeling. He is not telling his soul to cheer up; he is telling it where to put its weight while it is still cast down.

That distinction is the whole of what she needs, because she has been trying to produce the wrong thing. She has been reaching for the sensation and concluding, when it does not come, that the apparatus is broken.

You have been reaching for a feeling where the verse asks for a posture, because the written word puts hope in the imperative, which no feeling could ever be, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a translation note into something she can do at a table this afternoon.

And notice the tense at the end. I shall yet praise him. Not I am praising Him. Not I feel better. A future stated flatly by a man who currently feels nothing, and stated without any evidence in hand.

You are allowed to say a future you cannot presently feel, and Psalm 42 records that sentence from inside the flat stretch rather than after it, and the same Spirit who kept the psalm unresolved is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Fourteen months of feeling nothing, after twenty years of feeling everything, carried alone and explained to nobody, is a real weight and the settled circumstances make it heavier rather than lighter, because there is nothing to point at. Tell a doctor plainly about the fourteen months and about the twenty years before them, because a change of that size in how a person experiences anything is medical information and is often physical. Ask about a counselor, and say the true sentence to them, the one about the apparatus. And tell one friend, in plain words, that nothing is wrong and she has felt nothing for over a year.

And if the nothing has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it is not making it worse. You are held exactly as much in the year you feel nothing as in the twenty you felt everything, because Psalm 42:5 is spoken from inside the flat stretch and never once from the other side of it, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that true in the body rather than only in a psalm.