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symptomania n. the fantasy that there’s some elaborate diagnosis out there that neatly captures the kind of person you are, tying together your many flaws and contradictions into a single theme—which wouldn’t necessarily sort out the mess inside your head but would at least let you mark it with a little sign so people know to walk around it. From symptom + mania.
fitching v. intr. compulsively turning away from works of art you find frustratingly, nauseatingly good—wanting to shut off the film and leave the theater, or devour a book only in maddening little chunks—because it resonates at precisely the right frequency to rattle you to your core, which makes it mildly uncomfortable to be yourself.
solysium n. the unhinged delirium of being alone for an extended period of time—feeling
indosentia n. the fear that your emotions might feel profound but are crudely biological, less to do with meaning and philosophy than with hormones, endorphins, sleep cycles, and blood sugar—any of which might easily be tweaked to induce unfalsifiable feelings of joy, depression, bloodlust, or kinship, or even a spiritual transcendence of your physical body.
vicarous adj. curious to know what someone else would do if they were in your shoes, eager to watch another actor put their own spin on the character of You—carrying your body differently, speaking in a tone you never use, saying and doing things you didn’t even know were an option—a
bareleveling v. intr. trying to improve yourself without anyone else knowing about it, afraid that they’ll think it’s silly or grandiose or unnecessary, or that they’ll end up calling too much attention to your efforts, transforming a casual tweak into a flashy rebranding campaign. Armenian բարելավվել (barelavvel), to become better. Pronounced “bair-lev-uhl-ing.”
hiddled adj. feeling the loneliness of having to keep a secret to yourself.
povism n. the frustration of being stuck inside your own head, unable to see your face or read your body language in context, only ever guessing how you might be coming across—which makes you think of yourself as a detached observer squinting out at a lushly painted landscape, though to everyone else you seem woven right into the canvas. From point of view + ism. Blessed are the slugs, whose eyes are held aloft on wriggling stalks, just tall enough to see their entire bodies in context. Pronounced “poh-viz-uhm.”
AMBEDO a momentary trance of emotional clarity
You look around at all the other people who happen to share this corner of the world, and imagine where they came from, marveling that all of their paths managed to cross at this particular point in time. You think back to the series of events that brought you here, your choices and your mistakes and your achievements, such as they are. All the twists and turns over the years. It wasn’t what you thought it would be, and yet you can still look back on all the things you’ve lost, and the opportunities that came and went, and feel a pang of gratitude that it happened at all. And now here you are,
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you remember that you too are a guest on this Earth. Your life is not just a quest, or an opportunity, or a story to tell; it’s also just an experience, to be lived for its own sake. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than what it is. A single moment can still stand on its own, as a morsel of existence.
We can breathe this world in, and hold on to it as long as we can, but we can’t just stop there. We have to keep moving, digging around for some deeper meaning, hoping to find an escape hatch between one experience and the next. So we never feel stuck inside one little moment, one little life.
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
midding n. the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, talking quietly outside a party, resting your eyes in the back seat of a car listening to friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be. Middle English midding, alternate spelling of midden, a refuse heap that sits near a dwelling. Pronounced “mid-ing.”
flashover n. the moment a conversation becomes real and alive, when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of friction with the world. In firefighting, a flashover is when all the flammable material in an area combusts all at once.
fensiveness n. a knee-jerk territorial reaction when a friend displays a casual interest in one of your obsessions.
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.
moledro n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.
OPIA the ambiguous intensity of eye contact
The eye is a keyhole through which the world pours in, and a world spills out. For a few seconds, you can peek through into a vault that contains everything they are. Catching a glimpse of their vulnerability, their pain, their humor, their vitality, their power over others, and what they demand of themselves. But whether the eyes are the windows of the soul or the doors of perception, it doesn’t really matter: you’re still standing on the outside of the house.
Eye contact isn’t really contact at all. It’s only ever a glance—a near-miss—that you can only feel as it slips past you. There’s so much that we keep in the back room; so much that other people never get to see. We only ever offer up a sample of who we are, of what we think people want us to be. And yet, how rarely do we stop to look inside, let our eyes adjust, and try to see what’s really there, the worlds hidden away in the eyes of others.
Yours is the only vault you can’t see into, that you can’t size up in an instant. You’ll always have to wonder if someone might come along and peer into your soul. Or if anyone out there will put in the effort, trying to find the key.
hickering n. the habit of falling hard for whatever pretty new acquaintance happens to come along, spending hours wallowing in the handful of details you can gather about them, connecting the dots into elaborate constellations, even imagining an entire future together—images that have no particular purpose, except that they’re kinda fun to think about.
feresy n. the fear that your partner is changing in ways you don’t understand, even though they might be changes for the better, because it forces you to wonder whether your relationship needs a few careful nudges to fall back into balance, or perhaps is still as stable as ever, but involves a person who no longer exists.
Middle English fere, partner, companion + heresy, deviation from established practices or beliefs.
bye-over n. the sheepish casual vibe between two people who’ve shared an emotional farewell but then unexpectedly have a little extra time together, wordlessly agreeing to pretend that they’ve already moved on. From good-bye + do-over.
skidding v. intr. the practice of making offhand comments that sound sarcastic but are actually sincere and deeply felt.
ochisia n. the fear that the role you once occupied in someone’s life could be refilled without a second thought, which makes you wish that every breakup would include a severance package, a non-compete clause, and some sort of romantic placement program.
nachlophobia n. the fear that your deepest connections with people are ultimately pretty shallow, that although your relationships feel congenial in the moment, an audit of your life would reveal a smattering of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice, or loss.
fardle-din n. a long-overdue argument that shakes up a relationship, burning wildly through your issues like a forest fire, which clears out your dry and hollow grievances and reminds you that your roots run deeper than you think. Middle English fardel, burden or bundle + din, a loud cacophonous noise. Pronounced “fahr-dl-din.”
dolonia n. a state of unease prompted by people who seem to like you too much, which makes you wonder if they must have you confused with someone else—someone flawless, selfless, or easy to understand from a distance—feeling vaguely disappointed that they’re unwilling to spend the time it takes getting to know the real you.
suente n. the state of being so familiar with someone that you can be in a room with them without thinking, without holding anything back, or without having to say a word—to the extent that you have to remind yourself that they’re a different being entirely, that brushing hair away from their eyes won’t help you see any better.
lilo n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if you’d seen each other last week—which is all the more remarkable given that certain other people can make every lull in conversation feel like an eternity. From lifelong + lie low. Pronounced “lahy-loh.”
querinous adj. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship;
watashiato n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.
fata organa n. a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room—their
amoransia n. the melodramatic thrill of unrequited love; the longing to pine for someone you can never have, wallowing in devotion to some impossible person who could give your life meaning by their very absence.
redesis n. a feeling of queasiness while offering someone advice, knowing they might well face a totally different set of constraints and capabilities, any of which might propel them to a wildly different outcome—which makes you wonder if all of your hard-earned wisdom is fundamentally nontransferable, like handing someone a gift card in your name that probably expired years ago.
MOMENT OF TANGENCY a fleeting glimpse of what might have been
You and I have never met, many times before. Our paths might have crossed once or twice online, or while passing in the street. We might have spent an hour sitting back-to-back at the same airport gate, or even exchanged a few words over the phone, when I dialed your number by mistake. For all we know, we might have been living in the same neighborhood for decades—but against incredible odds, we just happened to miss each other. It’s a big world, after
Your business partner might be sitting on half of a world-changing idea, waiting for your contribution to arrive, though it never will. It’s hard not to glance at a stranger in a crowd and imagine the life you might have shared, if only things had been different—feeling a pang of missed connection as you carry on your separate ways, leaving nothing but an echo of something that might have been.
As you sit there on your commuter train, wrapped up in your own concerns, you have no way of knowing how close you’re sitting to the person you might have loved, who you might have spent years with, even built a family. You would have looked across the room at this same face, and struggled to imagine life without them, telling yourself that it was always meant to be. As if you had known all along that your paths would cross eventually.
