I Would Rather Live Like This

You have made a trade and I do not think you have ever said it out loud.

The trade is this: you will carry all of it, on your own, indefinitely, rather than have one person see it. And you have been paying that price so steadily and for so long that it does not feel like a decision any more. It feels like a fact about your life.

But it was a decision. You made it at some point, probably without noticing, and the terms are worse than you think.

Because it is not only the room you are keeping to yourself. It is the tiredness. It is the reason you say no to things. It is why you have a slightly different version of your life that you give people, and why conversations have to be steered, and why you have got so practiced at the doorstep. All of that is the cost of the trade, and you are paying it every day, and the thing you bought with it is that nobody knows.

I am not going to tell you to have somebody round. I want to be clear about that immediately, because you have read that suggestion before and it is why you stopped reading.

There is a step in between, and it is the one that is actually possible, and almost nobody names it.

You can tell somebody without showing them.

Woe to him that is alone when he falleth

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is unusually blunt about what being on your own actually costs.

For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. (Ecclesiastes 4:10, King James Version)

Woe to him that is alone when he falleth.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say the one who falls is at fault for falling. Falling is assumed. It is treated as a thing that happens to people, not as a failure of character, and the entire weight of the sentence lands somewhere else: on being alone when it happens.

So the problem being named here is not that you fell. Something went hard and the house went with it. The problem is that there has been nobody in the room since.

And the remedy in that verse is small. The one will lift up his fellow. Not fix his life, not take over his house, not assess him. Lift him up, which is what somebody does when they simply know where you are.

You are not being judged for falling, and heaven has never once treated the fall as the thing that went wrong here. Ecclesiastes 4:10 assumes the fall and puts the woe on being alone in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land on a person who has been holding both against themselves.

Telling is not showing

Here is the distinction the whole article turns on, and once it is clear the step gets much smaller.

Showing is a visit. Showing means a door open, a person walking down your hall, their eyes going where your eyes go. That is a big thing and I understand entirely why it is not available to you.

Telling is a sentence. It is one person knowing a true thing about your life. They can know it from their own kitchen, on a Tuesday, without ever seeing your hallway or asking to.

You have been treating those two as the same act, so when the thought of telling comes, your body answers the question about showing, and the answer is no. But they are not the same. Telling costs a sentence and it buys the end of the secret. The secret is the expensive part.

And the thing that makes telling bearable is that it is finished the moment you send it. There is nothing to prepare and nothing to tidy and no date to dread.

You are able to be known in this without being seen in it, and those two have never once been the same act. The written word puts the remedy at a person having another beside them rather than at a house being fit to enter, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates being known from being inspected.

One text. That is the whole thing

So here is the assignment, and I want to give you the size of it exactly.

Text one person and say the house is bad and you are working on it.

That is it. Two clauses. You do not explain, you do not give the year, you do not describe a room, and you do not invite them. You are not asking for help and you do not have to accept any that gets offered. If they ask a question you can say you would rather not go into it.

And you get to choose the person. It does not have to be the closest one. Sometimes the closest one is the hardest one, because their opinion of you is the one you have been protecting. Pick whoever the sentence would be least impossible to send to.

Ecclesiastes 4:10 says the one will lift up his fellow, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a two clause message possible for somebody who has not said this out loud in years.

You are able to send one sentence tonight, and it has never once obliged you to open a door. Ecclesiastes 4:10 puts the whole remedy in having somebody there rather than in the state of the room, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a person finally says the true thing to one other human being.