There Is No Word For This

There is no word for this.

I have a recurring dream. Someone is chasing me. Sometimes I know who they are, and sometimes it's just a presence. I barricade myself in a room, I call 911, and cannot speak.

It is happening again.

I'm at war with my being, betrayed by my body.

Down for the count, with only the power of my mind to save me, and she's distraught and fatigued.

(there is no word for this).

There are Things that happen to those of us in bodies. Sometimes the plumbing gets stopped up, or the chi doesn't flow, or we do something to invoke shame.

If we're in man bodies, we have word for a broad range of dysfunction – emasculate. It could refer to any number of things, like the plumbing and chi, or the way we're treated by our partner or our boss or society. Castration on any level. Removing one's sexual force, one's gendered identity, one's power.

You get the idea, regardless of your gender. You feel the empathy or the victory. Pathos.

I think I feel this, in the way my body has betrayed me.

But I have no way to tell you.

There is no word for this.

I'm not fighting for a diagnosis – I don't need a pill or a listing in the DSM – but simply a way to convey to you the dream feeling of opening my mouth to report a very real terror, and having nothing to say.

I have so much to say.

For the partners of PTSD.

For the widow parents who have lost children.

For those who experience birth after death.

There is no word for this.

When the thing that is lost is not visible, unexplainable.

Unspeakable.