A Conversation

You Don’t Have to Convince Me That You’ve Tried

A short Conversation for anyone who has had to explain herself far too many times.

You don’t have to convince me that you’ve tried.

I believe you. I believed you before you began explaining, and I’ll still believe you if you never explain at all.

I know something about the way this usually goes. You arrive with your story shortened, because you’ve learned how little time there is for it. You lead with the parts that sound most credible. You leave out the parts that make you sound tired, or dramatic, or difficult. You brace a little, in case someone decides — before you’ve finished speaking — what they think is wrong with you.

That is a great deal of work to do before a conversation has even started. And you have been doing it for a long time.

Nobody taught you to do it. You learned it the way most people learn things — by watching what happened when you didn’t. You told the whole story once, and you saw someone’s attention drift. You mentioned the tiredness and it got written down as something else. You described the pain honestly and heard the word anxiety. So the next time, you edited. And the time after that, you edited a little more.

By now the edit is automatic. You lead with the strongest evidence. You keep your voice steady so it doesn’t sound emotional. You mention the things you’ve already tried, in order, so no one suggests them again. You have a version of yourself that you bring to appointments, and it is shorter and calmer and less true than you are.

Here, you can set that version down.

Before we ever talk about your body, I’d like to meet you. Not your diagnosis. Not your MRI. Not the list you’ve memorized after years of appointments.

You.

Because your symptoms live inside a person, and if I never understand the person, I’ll never fully understand the body. Your body has lived one life — your life. It has carried your work, your family, your losses, your joys, and all the ways you kept going when no one else could see how difficult that had become.

The parts you’ve been editing out are usually the parts that matter most. The winter everything got worse. The job you stayed in longer than you should have. The months you slept badly and stopped mentioning it because it seemed beside the point. Those aren’t digressions. They’re the context that makes the rest of it make sense.

When a story arrives already trimmed, whoever hears it is working from fragments — and then their answer has to be a fragment too. That isn’t your fault. You were being considerate with the time you were given. But it does mean you have rarely been understood at full length, and that is a different thing from not having answers.

None of that is background information. It is the story. And people deserve to be understood before anyone tries to intervene.

So there is nothing to prove here. Not how much you’ve tried. Not how much it hurts. Not how patient you’ve been about it.

You have already done the hardest part, which was continuing.

What has it been like to carry all of this?

You don’t have to answer that today. It isn’t a question anyone should have to answer quickly.

I only wanted you to know that someone finally asked — and that the whole answer would be welcome here, whenever you’d like to give it.

And if you notice yourself starting to shorten it out of habit, that’s alright. It took years to learn. It’s allowed to take a while to unlearn. You can begin anywhere in the story you like. There is no wrong place, and there is no clock.

— Tammie

Another Conversation is being written slowly, and it will be waiting here when it’s ready. Nothing is expected of you between now and then.

And if you’d like to keep going in order rather than a page at a time, there’s a guided way through all of this — The Peacefully Stronger Beginning. It’s there whenever you’re curious; nothing here depends on it.

The conversation continues whenever you’re ready.

Whenever you’d like company again, the Conversations will be right where you left them.