The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

there’s a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don’t even know we’re missing. We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.

Words will never do us justice.

Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn’t just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness—setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be.

slipfast adj. longing to disappear completely; to melt into a crowd and become invisible, so you can take in the world without having to take part in it—free to wander through conversations without ever leaving footprints, free to dive deep into things without worrying about making a splash. From slip, to move or fly away in secret + fast, fortified against attack.

elsewise adj. struck by the poignant strangeness of other people’s homes, which smell and feel so different than your own—seeing the details of their private living space, noticing their little daily rituals, the way they’ve arranged their things, the framed photos of people you’ll never know. From else, other + wise, with reference to.

All those cheap and disposable experiences are no less real than anything in our history books, no less sacred than anything in our hymnals.

We need these silly little things to fill out our lives, even if they don’t mean all that much. If only to remind us that the stakes were never all that high in the first place. It’s not always life-and-death. Sometimes it’s just life—and that’s alright.

foreclearing n. the act of deliberately refusing to learn the scientific explanations of things out of fear that it’ll ruin the magic—turning flower petals into tacky billboards, decoding birdsong into trash talk, defracting a rainbow back inside its tiny prism. Danish forklaring, explanation. Pronounced “fohr-kleer-ing.”

ne’er-be-gone n. a person who has no idea where their home is, or was, or when they might have left it—which leaves their emotional compass free to swing around wildly as they move from place to place, pulling them everywhere and nowhere all at once, making it that much harder to navigate. Middle English naur, nowhere + begone, surrounded. Pronounced “nair-bi-gawn.”

But if someone were to ask you on your deathbed what it was like to live here on Earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.”

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

nighthawk n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming future—which you sometimes manage to forget for weeks, only to feel it land on your shoulder once again, quietly building a nest.

endzoned n. the hollow feeling of having gotten exactly what you thought you wanted, only to learn that it didn’t make you happy.

But what else could you try? How much do you really know about your interests? Do you actually like the things you like? What makes you happy? Surely it should be enough to sit by a pond in the park, watching the ducks, living in the moment. But what does that do for anybody? Where is the line between self-actualization and self-indulgence? How much of your time could be better spent trying to make a difference? Then again, what difference could you realistically hope to make? Perhaps you tell yourself it doesn’t matter as long as you do something—but wouldn’t that only prove you were doing it just for yourself, not for some greater cause? So where does that leave you?

And now here you are. Sometimes you find yourself wondering if you can change, even if you wanted to. If you still have enough fire in the belly to surprise yourself, or if you’re already set in your ways, too tough and cynical to stretch without shattering. Maybe you spent so long wondering who you were going to be one day, you forgot that that question actually has an answer, and that “one day” would soon arrive.