In a review of Joana Bourke’s The Story of Pain, Arthur Holland Michel considers how we find words for our suffering:
We “can express the thoughts of Hamlet,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1930, “but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” Even acute agony is so shifty, vague, embodied, and (at times) transcendental, it defies meaningful description. Stub your toe and it’s hard not to be hyperbolic, if not blasphemous. People say a pain “feels like getting stabbed,” even if they have never been stabbed and therefore have no idea what it actually feels like to be stabbed. …
People in Japan have “musk deer headaches,” and a hurting person in India might invoke “parched chickpeas.” The British “splitting headache!”—which was my mother’s go-to when we made a fuss—is no less peculiar. When trying to describe my shingles, I settled, in my delirium, to calling it “a jaunty hat of pain.” My uncle, who is fighting (bravely) against Lymphoma, says he feels that a cuckoo is trapped in his body, trying desperately to escape. I’m pretty sure he has never swallowed a live bird, and yet, like so many of Bourke’s sufferers, that’s as close as he can get to describing what he feels. As she points out, these descriptions, however bizarre and hyperbolic, still matter. By verbalizing how a pain feels, we are informing the way we feel it.
On a related note, Alana Massey movingly relates the challenge of articulating her experience of depression:
The English language has a great deficit in words to describe the impenetrable hopelessness that mental illness visits upon those afflicted with it. I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of time seeking out words in other languages that give form and substance to this lifetime of experiences. Germans have Verzweiflung, it is the direct translation of despair but it is aslo accompanied by fear and pain. The Czech litost is the torment of suddenly seeing the extent of one’s own misery. Toska is what Nabakov said could never be fully expressed in English words and described as “a sensation of spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.” …
[E]ven in possession of a reasonably sophisticated grasp of the English language, it is exceedingly rare that I speak of the ever-present sense of dread at having to go about a day, day after day, in more than a few words. Clever metaphors and well-crafted sentences have many merits but few palliative functions. Literary history is littered with the corpses of suicidal writers whose extensive catalogs dedicated primarily to pain demonstrate that to articulate suffering is not to be relieved of it. And so instead of giving a name or a shape to it with words, I have communicated suffering with personal absences and incomplete gestures and tasks since I was very small.
The Dish 