I Speak For Everyone But Me

She will go to war for anybody.

She has sat in a benefits office with a neighbor for three hours and made them go and get the right form. She rang a school about a child who was not hers and did not stop calling. There is a woman on her street who is in a house she would not otherwise be in, because of eleven phone calls that were not made by that woman.

She is not aggressive about it. She is patient and she is extremely hard to get rid of, and everybody who knows her knows this about her.

Her friend asked her a question in the car after the school thing, three years ago, and it was not a difficult question. She said: what do you need?

And she started to answer and found that she had nothing to say.

Not modesty. She sat in the passenger seat and looked for the answer the way you look for a word you know you know, and it was not there.

She said something about being fine and they drove on and her friend let it go, and she has thought about that silence more than she has told anybody.

If you can argue all day for somebody else, you know exactly what I mean.

The instruction and the exception

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting three years for anybody to say it.

Silence about your own need is not automatically humility. Sometimes a person genuinely does not need much and that is a good and free way to live. But not being able to find the answer at all is a different thing, and it is worth looking at rather than filing under selflessness.

Now read the instruction you have kept faithfully for twenty years, and then read who it covers.

Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.Proverbs 31:8

Open your mouth for the one who has no voice in the matter. That is the whole command, and you have obeyed it better than almost anybody, and nobody reading this page is going to suggest otherwise.

Here is the question. Where is the clause that excludes you?

There is not one. The instruction is about opening a mouth on behalf of somebody with no voice in a matter, and you have decided, without ever writing it down, that this cannot include the person doing the opening.

You are inside the instruction rather than outside it, and the exception with your name on it was never in the text. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Proverbs 31:8, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So twenty years of nothing to say has not been humility. You have a voice that has never once been used on your own behalf, and using it is the same act you have done for everybody else. The word settled that before you sat in that benefits office, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the car while you read this.

Why the answer was not there

Here is what is worth naming, because you have been treating the blank as evidence of something.

You have assumed the blank means you do not need anything. It is likelier that it means you have not been asked in a long time, and that a question you never practice answering is a question you get slow at.

Think about how good you are at the other thing. You can walk into an office and state somebody else's case in four sentences with the relevant fact at the front. That is a skill, and you have it because you have done it four hundred times.

You have done your own perhaps twice, both times badly, and once when you were twenty three.

That is not a character flaw. It is a muscle that has never been asked to do anything.

And there is a second thing. Advocating for somebody else is safe in a way that asking for yourself is not, because if the office says no to your neighbor's claim, they are refusing a claim. If they say no to yours, some part of you will hear it as a verdict about whether you were worth it, and you have arranged your whole life so that you never have to find out.

You have permission to say what you need out loud, and the permission was already in the instruction you have been keeping for twenty years. Proverbs 31 says open your mouth for the one with no voice; His Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to answer a plain question about herself.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot state a need is that somebody near you punishes you for having one, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Tell one person who can act. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.