"You had to be there..."

Can language capture the complexity and enormity of experience? I have often tried to describe, draw, re-tell, and spell out experiences when I often find myself saying, "you had to be there." In the end, even my own memories do not give justice to my experiences and I find myself holding on to scraps of details in what seems like a fictional story.

I used to write in a diary, and hilarious though it may be, I have a hard time recollecting the real experience itself. It has become a story written down in a book, but the words on the page still do not reflect the complexity of the experiences I described, even to its own writer.

Even if the writer him/herself is a magician of imagery, talented in every attempt to re-live an experience on paper, articulate in sight, sound, smell, even touch, there is always something missing, something indescribable we will never know about that moment. One can get an idea, a picture, even feel the emotions of the moment, but to know accurately an experience to all of its complexity is to be there, in that moment yourself. Even if two people were in the same place at the same time, in fact, both would be having different experiences (depending on age, gender, attitude, other life experiences, priorities, etc.). Therefore, not only is language inept at truly capturing the complexity of an experience, we cannot even understand another's experience when we were there ourselves.

Language can bring about imagery, emotion, logic, ideas, sounds, even smells, but to truly capture the enormity of experience, one just has to live it.