Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

I was pretty good at picking up new languages when I was little, but it's not like I had superpowers or anything.

Kids just have an easier time with words.

And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracise and minimise. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with.