In 2014, a strand of RNA called an enterovirus invaded my meninges, the lining that covers my brain and spinal cord. As the virus used the machinery of my cells to make more of itself, those new viral particles invaded further cells. I soon became extremely sick. The symptoms of viral meningitis can vary, but they often include stiff neck, fever, nausea, and an unshakable belief that viruses are not merely unalive.

Also, there is the headache.

Virginia Woolf wrote in “On Being Ill” that it is “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no.” She goes on to note, “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.”

Woolf had migraines, so she knew this poverty of language firsthand, but anyone who has ever been in pain knows how alone it can make you feel—partly because you’re the only one in your pain, and partly because it is so infuriatingly and terrifyingly inexpressible. As Elaine Scarry argues in her book The Body in Pain, physical pain doesn’t just evade language. It destroys language. When we are really hurting, after all, we can’t speak. We can only moan and cry.

“Whatever pain achieves,” Scarry writes, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.” I can tell you that having meningitis involves headaches, but that does little to communicate the consciousness-crushing omnipresence of that headache. All I can say is that when I had viral meningitis, I had a headache that made it impossible to have anything else. My head didn’t hurt so much as my self had been rendered inert by the pain in my head.

But I think it is impossible to communicate the nature and severity of such pain. As Scarry puts it, “To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Hearing about pain that we do not feel takes us to the limits of empathy, the place where it all breaks down. I can only know my pain, and you can only know yours. We’ve tried all sorts of ways to get around this axiom of consciousness. We ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten, or we tell them to point at the face that looks most like their pain. We ask them if the pain is sharp or dull, burning or stabbing—but all of these are metaphors, not the thing itself. We turn to feeble similes, and say that the pain is like a jackhammer at the base of the skull, or like a hot needle through the eye. We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.