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In language, all things are possible. Which means that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is too obscure to define. We just have to do it.
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.
kairosclerosis n. the moment you look around and realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart, and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.
looseleft adj. feeling a sense of loss upon finishing a good book, sensing the weight of the back cover locking away the lives of characters you’ve gotten to know so well.
jouska n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a devastating comeback, a cathartic heart-to-heart—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage that feels far more satisfying than the small-ball strategies of everyday life.
volander n. the ethereal feeling of looking down at the world through an airplane window, able to catch a glimpse of far-flung places you’d never see in person, free to let your mind wander, trying to imagine what they must feel like down on the ground—the closest you’ll ever get to an objective point of view. Latin volare, to fly + solander, a book-shaped box for storing maps. Pronounced “voh-land-uhr.”
rumspringa
Life is not a flat and barren outpost, and it’s not a bangarang wonderland either. Maybe they’re just two different ways of looking at some ambiguous middle place,
rückkehrunruhe n. the feeling of returning from an immersive trip only to notice it fading rapidly from your awareness, as if your brain had automatically assumed it was all just a dream and already went to work scrubbing it from your memory. German rückkehren, coming back + Unruhe, restlessness. Compare Zugunruhe, “migration restlessness,” the fidgety behavior observed in birds approaching migration. Pronounced “rook-kair-oon-roo-uh.”
ghough n. a hollow place in your psyche that can never be filled; a bottomless hunger for more food, more praise, more attention, more affection, more joy, more sex, more money, more hours of sunshine, more years of your life; a state of panic that everything good will be taken from you too early, which makes you want to swallow the world before it ends up swallowing you.
vaucasy n. the fear that you’re little more than a product of your circumstances, that for all the thought you put into shaping your beliefs and behaviors and relationships, you’re essentially a dog being trained by whatever stimuli you happen to encounter—reflexively drawn to whoever gives you reliable hits of pleasure, skeptical of ideas that make you feel powerless.
liberosis n. the desire to care less about things; to figure out a way to relax your grip on your life and hold it loosely and playfully, keeping it in the air like a volleyball, with quick and fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play. Italian libero, free. A libero is a position on a volleyball team that can move at greater liberty than other players, subbing freely and without permission, with an emphasis on keeping the ball in play. Pronounced “lib-er-oh-sis.”
endzoned n. the hollow feeling of having gotten exactly what you thought you wanted, only to learn that it didn’t make you happy.
1202 n. the tipping point when your brain becomes so overwhelmed with tasks you need to do, you feel too guilty to put anything off until later, prioritizing every little thing at the top of the list, leaving you immobilized. During the lunar descent of Apollo 11, the “1202” alarm sounded just before landing, indicating that the computer was receiving more data than it could process. Pronounced “twelve oh two.”
Maybe you have no true colors. You’re not some finished painting, signed and sealed in varnish. If there is a “real you,” surely it’s the mess of paint on the palette: colors swirling and mixing and playing together, perpetually unfinished, searching and striving to make something new.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. —LOUISE ERDRICH, The Painted Drum
mottleheaded adj. feeling uneasy when socializing with odd combinations of friends and family, or friends and colleagues, or colleagues and family—mixing a medley of ingredients that don’t typically go together, which risks either watering down your identity into gray mush, or accidentally triggering some sort of explosion.
the McFly effect n. the phenomenon of observing your parents interact with people they grew up with, which reboots their personalities into youth mode, offering you a glimpse of the dreamers and rascals they used to be, before you came into the picture. Refers to Marty McFly, the protagonist of Back to the Future, who travels back in time and interacts with his parents while they’re still in their teens.
GNOSSIENNE the awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life
People sometimes speak of a relationship as a kind of union, but in truth, you are two separate people, with different lives, different bodies, a different past, and a different future. Each of you is a wholeness unto itself, with a tiny but unmistakable gap.
thrapt adj. awed at the impact someone has had on your life, feeling intimidated by how profoundly they helped shape your identity, having served as a ghostwriter of a work that nevertheless only appears under your name.
siso n. a solitary experience you wish you could have shared with someone else—having dinner in a romantic setting, reaching the summit after an arduous climb, having a run-in with a crazy stranger that nobody’s going to believe—which makes you look around for confirmation that it even happened at all.
In art as in love, one never knows how two people find each other, if they ever meet at all.
Strange that no matter how predictable your life is, nobody in history has ever lived it before.
ZENOSYNE the feeling that time is getting faster
So even when you’re holding still, settling down to bed at the end of a long day, it feels like you’re running somewhere. And even if tomorrow you manage to run a little faster, and stretch your arms a little farther, you’ll still feel the seconds slipping away as you drift around the bend.
thwit n. a pang of shame when an embarrassing memory from adolescence rushes back into your head from out of nowhere, which is somehow no less painful even if nobody else remembers it happened in the first place. Acronym of The Hell Was I Thinking?
etterath n. the feeling of emptiness after a long and arduous process is finally complete—having finished school, recovered from surgery, or gone home at the end of your wedding—which leaves you relieved that it’s over but missing the stress that organized your life into a mission. Norwegian etter, after + råtne, decay. Pronounced “et-er-rath.”
epistrix n. a disconcerting cluster of endings that all seem to happen at once; a random barrage of departures and closures and divorces and series finales and celebrity deaths, which leaves you anxiously aware that the author of your story seems to be wrapping up an awful lot of loose ends.
Maybe words are like those dirt paths that cut diagonally across the lawns of college campuses. When the proper path is too difficult or ineffective to express an idea—when “self-portrait with a phone” doesn’t seem to cover it anymore—someone will cut to the chase and blaze a new trail.
