The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

OZURIE feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have Consider Dorothy, the orphan girl of Kansas, sitting up in her bed at the end of the movie. While the credits roll and the music swells, with the Land of Oz still fading from her eyes, she whispers to herself, “There’s no place like home.” Eventually, of course, she knows she’ll have to get out of bed, put on a pair of ordinary black slippers, and carry on with her life on the farm. Counting the chicks, darning the stockings, pushing gray eggs around a cast-iron pan. She’ll play around with Toto, just as she did before. And when she opens the door, she’ll step out into a world of black and white, into a broad sweep of flat land that reaches the edge of the sky in all directions. And she’ll know that she’s not in Oz anymore. She had her rumspringa and chose to return, which means she is now a confirmed Kansan. And yet, even as she makes her way to school the next morning, she now carries with her a certain unshakable awareness—that her gray gingham dress is secretly blue, that her charcoal hair is actually a rich auburn, that the sky catches fire when the sun goes down. She’ll try to blink the colors out of her eyes, but she’ll never be able to forget that there’s an entire dimension hidden inside things. Everything will now have a grainy reticence that feels intolerable to her. She knows that this humdrum workaday world can explode without warning, blooming with color and potential and chaos. She alone can...

aubadoir n. the otherworldly atmosphere just before 5 a.m., when the bleary melodrama of an extremely late night becomes awkwardly conflated with the industrious fluorescence of a very early morning. French aubade, an ode to the morning + abattoir, slaughterhouse. Pronounced “oh-bah-dwahr.”

should try keeping our eyes open while we pray, and look for the meaning hidden in the things right in front of us:

justing n. the habit of telling yourself that just one tweak could solve all of your problems—if only you had the right haircut, if only you found the right group of friends, if only you made a little more money, if only he noticed you, if only she loved you back, if only you could find the time, if only you were confident—which leaves you feeling perpetually on the cusp of a better life, hanging around the top of the slide waiting for one little push.

This is what I believe: “That I am I.” “That my soul is a dark forest.” “That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.” “That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.” “That I must have the courage to let them come and go.” “That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.” There is my creed. —D. H. LAWRENCE, Studies in Classic American Literature

foilsick adj. feeling ashamed after revealing a little too much of yourself to someone—allowing them too clear a view of your pettiness, your anger, your cowardice, your childlike vulnerability—wishing you could somehow take back the moment, discreetly bolting the door after a storm had already blown it off its hinges. Scottish Gaelic foillsich, to expose.

You might be tempted to define yourself by victimhood or self-diagnosis, as if all of your flaws were merely symptoms of some huge systemic problem outside your control. Maybe you lose yourself in work or play or drunkenness, or surrender to the arbitrary dictates of your own moods.