Anything But The Thing I Need To Feel

There is a thing in Dan's life that he has not looked at directly since about the middle of last year, and he could not tell you what would happen if he did.

He is not being coy about it. He genuinely does not know its exact shape, which is the whole point: you do not learn the shape of something you have never turned toward.

Some of it is his father, who is not dying but is not well, and who says things on the phone now that his father would never have said.

Some of it is a decision Dan made about work four years ago that he has never once regretted out loud, and about which something in him is not finished.

And some of it, and this is the piece that surprises him when it surfaces, is about being thirty-nine and looking at a life that is genuinely good and feeling something he does not have a word for, which is not unhappiness and which will not leave.

He knows precisely when it is near. It comes at a specific temperature: usually about nine at night, usually in a quiet house, usually when he has stopped moving.

And his hand goes to the phone before the feeling has finished arriving.

That is the mechanism, and it is not really about the phone at all. It is that there is a thing at the edge of him, and the moment it approaches he supplies himself with two hours of anything else, and the two hours work, and he goes to bed and nothing has been felt.

He has been doing that for about fourteen months.

I do not think I am addicted to this. I think I am using it as an anesthetic, and the thing it is anesthetizing has not gone anywhere.

And here is where I stop talking about Dan, because you have your own thing at the edge, and you know its temperature and its hour, and your hand knows too.

Let me say the first thing carefully, because you are about to be told this is a discipline problem and it is not. What has happened is that you found something that reliably works, and it does work, and it costs a great deal, and nobody has ever offered you an alternative that acknowledged the feeling was real.

There is somewhere for it to go

Let me put the true thing down first, because your actual question is not about screens.

Your question is what happens if you put it down and the thing is still there. And the answer is that there is somewhere for it to go, and it is not a technique and it is not a journal, and the verse that says so is unusually blunt about the manner of the pouring:

Trust in Him at all times; you people, pour out your heart before Him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Take pour out seriously, because it is not a decorous word. It is what you do with a jug. It is not sipping or explaining or presenting: it is turning a container over and letting the whole of it go somewhere.

And notice the order. The pouring comes first, and then the reason: God is a refuge for us. A refuge is a place that is already there, already standing, whether or not you have made it to the door. The verse does not ask you to become calm first. It asks you to empty something into a place that can hold it. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

So the feeling has a destination and it is not you, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own suggestion, and God's Spirit is the one who makes that room real rather than metaphorical at nine at night in a quiet house.

The anesthetic works, and that is the problem

Now let me be honest about the mechanism, because vague talk here will not survive tonight.

It works. That is why you use it. Two hours of anything else and the temperature drops and you go to bed, and nothing terrible happens, and by the morning the thing has receded to the edge again where it lives.

The cost is not the time, although fourteen months of it is a real number. The cost is that nothing arrives anywhere. Feelings that are never poured out do not evaporate. They wait, and they get slightly heavier, and eventually they stop announcing themselves at nine at night and start showing up as something else: a flatness, a shortness with people, a sense of standing at a distance from your own good life.

And here is the piece that will surprise you: the thing at the edge probably does not need to be solved. Most of what a person is carrying does not require a solution. It requires being felt in the presence of Somebody, which is a completely different transaction and takes considerably less time than two hours.

Hear this: your attention belongs to you and it was given to you, and there is no part of it God assigned to keeping you at a distance from your own life. And what you have been avoiding is allowed to be poured out rather than fixed. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can do tonight rather than something you understand.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. If what is at the edge is heavy, get real help and none of it is small faith. A counselor is exactly the right tool for a thing you cannot turn toward alone, and it is not an overreaction at all. A doctor is worth telling if the flatness has spread, because what you are describing can be a low mood and low mood responds to treatment. And tell one friend in daylight, because a thing at the edge of a man stays enormous while nobody has ever heard it described out loud.