When They Do Not Believe Your Body

"Well, the good news is your bloods came back completely normal."

She says thank you. She has been saying thank you in that room for four years and she says it again, and she picks up her bag, and she gets as far as the corridor before the sentence finishes arriving.

The good news.

She sits in the car in the multi-story for a long time without putting the key in. It is not the appointment. The appointment was fine. He was kind, he was not rushed, he did not say anything unkind, and that is the part that makes it impossible to explain to anyone: nobody has ever been cruel to her about this. They have just, very gently, over four years, stopped believing her.

She can chart it. Year one, everybody asked how she was. Year two, people started saying you look really well. Year three, her sister said are you sure it's not just stress, and meant it lovingly, and she has never brought it up with her since. Somewhere in there she started saying "I'm fine" in a particular voice that closes the subject, and she got good at it, and now she has a whole life running on that voice.

And here is the thing she would never say out loud in the daylight. She has started doing it to herself. There is a moment, most days, usually late, when the pain is at its worst and something in her says: what if it isn't real. Not what if they are wrong. What if she is the unreliable narrator of her own body.

That is what four years of gentle doubt does. It moves in.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you have a corridor and you have a car and you have the voice that closes the subject. You have a thing in your body that is doing exactly what it does, right now, while you read this, and there is no photograph of it and no number on a page that proves it, and you have got so used to carrying it unwitnessed that you have started to wonder whether you have any right to it at all.

You do. And you are about to be told so by Someone whose testimony nobody in that corridor can overturn.

The pain nobody else saw was already on record

There is a psalm written by a man in the worst possible position, and it is worth knowing where he was standing when he wrote it.

David is in Gath. Not on a throne, not in a field with a harp, and not surrounded by loyal men. He is in the enemy's city, alone, and he is so exposed that at one point he saves his own life by pretending to be out of his mind, scratching at the gate and letting spit run into his beard so the king will throw him out rather than kill him. He is not believed. He is not defended. There is not one person in that place who would speak for him.

And out of that, he writes a line that has held people upright for three thousand years.

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?Psalm 56:8

Sit in the strangeness of that for a second, because it is far stranger than it sounds in English.

Tossings. The Hebrew word is about wandering, the restless, sleepless moving of a person who cannot get settled. It is the word for what your body does at two in the morning when you are turning over for the ninth time trying to find the position that hurts least. And the word he uses for God's bottle, the skin flask a traveler carried, sounds almost exactly the same. He is doing what Hebrew does when it is at its most serious: putting two words side by side that sound alike so that you cannot hear one without the other. My tossing. Your flask. The thing that spilled out of me. The thing You caught it in.

Then, in case anyone missed it, he adds a third image. Are they not in Your book? A scroll. A record. A written account, kept in order, held by an archivist who does not lose things.

Now look at what is actually being claimed there, because it is not comfort in the soft sense. It is a claim about evidence.

Every single night you have spent turning over in the dark is counted. Not sympathized with. Counted. The tears you cried in a car park where nobody could see you are not gone, they are held, the way you would hold water in a desert, which is to say as something too valuable to spill. And the whole of it, the four years of it, the flare last Tuesday that ruined a day you had been looking forward to for a month, is written in a book by a hand that does not need a scan to confirm it.

You have been living as though your pain is unwitnessed. It is the most exhausting part of the whole thing, more exhausting than the pain itself, and I want to say plainly: it is not true, and it has never been true, not for one night of it.

There has been a witness in the room the entire time. He was not waiting for the results.

And hear this too, because we carry the burden here and never hand it back to you. Nobody is going to suggest that the doubt in that corridor is somehow your fault, or that if you had more faith the tests would have said something different. That is not how any of this works and it never was. Keep every appointment you have. Take what you have been prescribed by the people caring for you. Nothing in this message stands between you and the care in your hands.