The Words You Don't Have

I feel stuck. It is one of the most common sentences in the language and one of the least useful, because it covers about nine different situations that share nothing except the discomfort.

You might mean the work is too easy. You might mean it is too hard and you cannot say so. You might mean you are very good at something you never chose, or well paid and unwatched, or that the ladder in front of you leads somewhere you have no interest in going, or that there is no ladder and you have only just noticed. Each is a different problem with a different move attached, and two or three could be solved inside a month.

You get to none of them, because you have one word and the word is stuck.

Resolution

The word is not a description of your situation. It is the limit of what you can see of it.

Language works like resolution. At low resolution your life is one grey shape with a label on it, and the label is doing all the work. Raise the resolution and the shape separates into parts, and the parts have edges, and the edges are where you can get hold of something.

I have a great deal of freedom and nobody to learn from is the same life at a higher resolution, and it comes with an obvious next move: find somebody better than you and get within range of him. The work is good and completely invisible is another, and it points somewhere else entirely, at who sees the work rather than at the work itself. Neither move is available while the whole thing is one word.

You can only act on distinctions you can state. Everything underneath the resolution of your language reaches you as undifferentiated pressure, and pressure has no handles on it.