You don't mean 'tired'

On the placeholder women reach for because the real thing would take too long to say.

A friend started telling me something yesterday but stopped halfway through. She was talking about her job, or what was happening at her job, or what was happening to her inside the job. Then she wasn’t. Her sentence dissolved into a shrug, and she moved on to something else.

I knew what had happened in the gap. I’ve done it myself, hundreds of times. The mid-sentence calculation. Is this person ready to hear this. Will it make the air heavy. Is there time. Is there room. Has the conversation already used up its tolerance for this kind of thing.

I cut a sentence twice that afternoon. Once with the same friend, later, about something different. Once with my mum. Both times mid-clause. Both times I felt the trim happen.

I’ve noticed that we trim each other’s truths down to a size the conversation can carry, and the cut is doing something stranger than dishonesty.

You’d think the unsaid thing was a finished thought waiting in the wings, ready to come on stage if the conversation made room for it. But I don’t think that’s what’s there. Instead, what’s there is something rougher. Less articulate. A pressure with no shape yet. The cut doesn’t trim a finished sentence. It refuses to start one that would have had to be invented in the saying.

This is the part I keep coming back to. The thing I was about to say to my friend, I hadn’t said to myself. There wasn’t a sentence sitting in me, fully formed, that I declined to release. There was a feeling, and the feeling would have had to be put into words for the first time, in front of her, and I didn’t trust the form it was going to take. I didn’t trust whether she’d be able to hold it. I didn’t trust whether I could finish it without losing my footing. I cut it before it could test any of that.

There’s a philosopher I keep thinking about when this happens. Judith Butler, who has spent a career on the question of what it is to give an account of yourself. Her argument, in plain language: you can’t, not fully, because you weren’t there when the self that’s now narrating was being made. You came into language late. The terms you have for yourself were given to you. So when you try to tell someone what’s going on with you, you’re working with materials you didn’t choose, in a form that wasn’t designed for the telling. A conversation. A moment. A relationship.

What you can say is shaped by who’s listening. And who’s listening shapes who you can be in language, in that moment.

I notice this in myself and the women around me. The half-said. The almost-said. The version that’s been pre-trimmed by the time it leaves the mouth. We say something close to the thing. We say a more acceptable version. We swap the actual feeling for the recognisable label, because the label slots into the conversation and the actual feeling would have to be built from scratch.

I do this with the word tired. I say tired when what I mean is a longer, lower-grade thing I haven’t found a name for. Tired is the version that fits. Tired is the version the conversation can carry. The actual thing would take too long to say and wouldn’t be ready when I started.

I’ve been trying to find a name for the cutting itself. The mid-sentence trim. The reflex to keep your interior down to a size your listener can take in one mouthful. The closest I’ve come is self-prevention. Refusing to let something become a something.

Some of it is care. We don’t burden each other with our raw material out of a real respect for the size of the conversation. Some of it is how friendship works. What looks like trimming, in those moments, is just choosing what to bring.

There’s another version of it I’m less comfortable with. A body that has learned, over years, never to put another woman in the position of having to hold what you’re carrying. Never to make her say I’m sorry, I have to go in five. Never to risk being the friend who used the time up.

I don’t know where one ends and the other begins. I’ve been doing both for so long they’ve grown into each other.

What I do know is that the moment when my friend’s sentence dissolved wasn’t a moment of her holding back. It was a moment of her trying, and the form failing her, and her body deciding the failure was less costly than the attempt.

Her shrug was the form that absorbed the unsayable. A shrug is what you do when a sentence didn’t exist yet and the conversation has moved on.

What goes unsaid is what we couldn’t quite get to in time, in this form, with this listener. It is still real. It is still happening. It is doing whatever the unsaid does to a body that’s still carrying it.

I wonder how much of what I think I know about my own life is just the part that has so far survived being said.