Something doesn't feel right, and hasn't for a while. You couldn't name it, not to family, not to your best friend. You might even have had a GP conversation that ended with "try to relax a little more." No prescription, nothing to take away, not even a nudge toward talk therapy. Just another question. What was all that about? Doesn't everyone get a referral?
The temptation to hunt for a name is real, and it's everywhere. But the answers you find don't fit, none of them feel right. So maybe what's happening isn't a symptom at all. Maybe it's just you, noticing.
Which means your question might become: Does not having a label get you through the door? If it does, shouldn't you be apologising for not knowing what's wrong?
You're taking time with someone and you can't really answer "why are you here", even if you were never asked that question. It's normal. All you know is that it's something, it's not nothing, and you've been told to relax.
The apology is an everyday standard. You learn how quickly it needs deploying, because the gap where knowing should be, demands it. Whether you say it walking through the door, or once you've sat down, or never say it at all as "I don't know". It's around us.
So much of our lives is built on knowing, and on demonstrating that we know. Knowing is power, after all. So arriving without an answer might just challenge your image of you.
When nothing you find quite fits
There's a search here that's been going on a while without turning anything up. It isn't a failing of intellect, but you're trying to answer a feeling with a thought. Perhaps that's why it feels like you might not have prepared properly.
If this isn't an intellectual response, it could be an emotional one, raw and not yet formed.
If it is, there's a different question available. Not the one that brought you here, took you to the GP, or had you sitting with your mother. That one kept returning more questions, the measuring kind, the defining kind. If I can name it I can fix it.
That's not the wrong instinct. It's just not what this is.
So let me ask you something else. What would it be like to sit down and say I've got no explanation, I have no answer, and I don't know what happens next?