There are things you cannot understand before you have the words, and the words come from having lived something. Descriptions of exhaustion, of long love, of watching a parent decline, remain abstractions until experience supplies the referent. The delay is not a failure of attention on your part or of teaching on anyone else’s.

So be generous with people who cannot yet hear you, and patient with yourself about what you have not yet grasped. Say the thing anyway. Understanding arrives on its own schedule, and having heard it once beforehand often makes the arrival easier when it comes.