There is a thing you already know. Not something that might be discovered by thinking about it hard enough for long enough. Something known, plainly, and known for a considerable while, and the days have been quietly arranged so as never to be alone with it.
Everybody has one and most people have several. It is about a relationship, or work, or health, or a direction that has quietly become the wrong direction, or somebody who has not been forgiven, or something done once that has never actually been admitted in words.
And the strangest part of the whole arrangement is that it is not being hidden from anybody else. Other people can often see it perfectly clearly and some of them have tried to mention it. The only person it is being kept from is the one it belongs to, which is a peculiar thing to organise and a great deal of work to maintain.
How the agreement works
It is not repression exactly, because it is known and could be produced if it had to be. It is much more like an agreement not to bring it up. The thought approaches, gets to a certain distance, and something turns it aside quickly and efficiently, and the rest of the day goes on without the turn ever quite registering.
This can run for years. It can run for decades without any interruption at all. And it requires constant small management, which is why so many people in this situation carry a heaviness that nothing in their week explains and nothing in their weekend relieves.
Saying that it is fine is how it is done. Not saying it to other people, which is very often just ordinary politeness and harms nobody. Saying it inside, about something that is not fine, until the sentence has been repeated so many times that it has worn a groove and arrives automatically before any actual assessment takes place. By then it is not a lie. It is a reflex, and reflexes are not examined.
Why we do it
Because the thing that would follow from admitting it is large. Admit this about the work, and something has to change and there is no visible way how. Admit this about this relationship, and something has to be said, and what happens after that is entirely unknown. So the admission gets postponed until circumstances are better, and circumstances are never better, because circumstances were never what was in the way.
There is a second reason, which is sadder and considerably more common than the first. To admit the thing would also mean admitting something about the person who has been living beside it without speaking. Not only that a choice was poor, which most of us can manage, but that we were somebody who could go on for that long without saying so. That is a much more expensive admission, and it is the one that keeps the oldest of these sealed.
So people find themselves at sixty defending a position they stopped believing at thirty-five. Not out of conviction, because the conviction went a long time ago. Because of what would have to be true about the twenty-five years in between, and that is a cost nobody wants to face on an ordinary evening.
The knowing does not leave
None of it ever goes away. The knowing sits exactly where it was, patiently, for as long as it takes, and it does not decay and it does not become less true with age. Time does nothing to it whatsoever, which is not what we are led to expect.
And it makes itself felt in ways that are very hard to trace back to their source. A heaviness on certain mornings that has no explanation. An irritation with somebody who has done absolutely nothing. A restlessness with no object. All of these are the same thing arriving sideways, because the front door has been closed to it and it will use whatever entrance is available.
Hurt is not there to be removed, and that is what takes longest to accept. It is there to show something, and once it has shown it, it stops. It will keep presenting the same thing for as long as anybody keeps declining to receive it, patiently, indefinitely, without any sign of tiring. So do not say it is okay when it is not okay. Not to yourself. That is the only place where the sentence does any real damage.
