The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

scabulous adj. proud of a certain scar on your body, which is like an autograph signed to you by a world grateful for your continued willingness to play with her, even if it hurts.

How many of your snapshots could easily be replaced by a thousand identical others? Is there any value left in taking yet another photo of the moon, or the Taj Mahal, or the Eiffel Tower? Is a photograph just a kind of souvenir to prove you’ve been someplace, like a prefabricated piece of furniture that you happened to have assembled yourself?

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. From looseleaf, a removable sheet of paper + left, departed.

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

fitzcarraldo n. a random image that becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling around in your head, itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality.

exulansis n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story, until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land. Latin exulans, exile, wanderer, derived from the Latin name of the Wandering Albatross, diomedea exulans, who spend most of their life in flight, rarely landing, going hours without even flapping their wings. The albatross is a symbol of good luck, a curse, and a burden, and sometimes all three at once. Pronounced “ek-suh-lan-sis.” la cuna n. a twinge of sadness that there’s no frontier left, that as the last explorer trudged his armies toward the last blank spot on the map, he didn’t suddenly turn for home, leaving one last island unexplored so we could set it aside as a strategic reserve of mystery.

OZURIE feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have

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.

Sometimes the world feels pretty much stuck in place, and you’ve made your peace with that. Why

idlewild adj. feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything—sitting for hours at an airport gate, the sleeper car of a train, or the backseat of a van on a long road trip—which temporarily alleviates the burden of being able to do anything at any time and frees up your brain to do whatever it wants to do, even if it’s just to flicker your eyes across the passing landscape.

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.

mahpiohanzia n. the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the burden of your own weight, which you’ve been carrying your entire life without a second thought.

kick drop n. the moment you wake up from an immersive dream and have to abruptly recalibrate to the real world—unquitting your job, falling right back out of love, reburying your lost loved ones.

So much of life is spent this way, in ordinary time. There’s no grand struggle, no sacraments, no epiphanies. Just simple domesticity, captured in little images, here and there.

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.

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. Onomatopoeic to the sound of a devouring maw. Pronounced “hawkh,” with air drawn sharply inward through the mouth. ringlorn adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales—a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game

where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

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. From Jacques de Vaucanson, a French engineer who built a series of lifelike programmable machines (automata), including his masterpiece the Digesting Duck, which could flap its wings and quack, drink water, and digest bits of grain into simulated excrement. Pronounced “vaw-kuh-see.”

emodox n. someone whose mood is perpetually out of sync with everyone else around them, prone to feelings of naptime panic, heart-to-heart snark, or dance club pensiveness. From emotional

whipgraft delusion n. the phenomenon in which you catch your reflection in the mirror and get the sense that you’re peering into the eyes of a stranger, as if you’re looking at a police sketch of your own face aged forward twenty years, which would imply that the real you is out there somewhere, wandering the streets of your old neighborhood, still at large.

agnosthesia n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed. Ancient Greek

trueholding n. the act of trying to keep an amazing discovery to yourself, fighting the urge to shout about it from the rooftops because you’re afraid that it’ll end up being diluted and distorted, and will no longer have been created just for you.

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

altschmerz n. a sense of weariness with the same old problems that you’ve always had,

the same boring issues and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for decades, which makes you want to spit them out and dig up some fresher pain you might have buried in your mental backyard.

tarrion n. an odd interval of blankness you feel after something big happens to you but before you feel the resulting emotional reaction—stunned by a sudden loss, a stroke of luck, or an unexpected visitor—like those tension-filled seconds between a flash of lightning and

wellium n. an excuse you come up with to rationalize a disappointing outcome—telling yourself you weren’t in the mood for that sold-out show anyway, that your safety school is actually a better fit, that your dream job might have been a bit too stressful.

warning to Icarus, as he stretched out his wings for the first time: “Don’t fly too near

Maybe your self-mythology is no different than any other mythology. It’s a story that changes in the telling, evolving over time. Whatever resonates will stay, and what doesn’t will fall away. To pick away at the literal truth is to miss the point of it, miss the joy of it. So go ahead and build your myth. Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree.

proluctance n. the paradoxical urge to avoid doing something you’ve been looking forward to—opening a decisive letter, meeting up with a friend who’s finally back in town, reading a new book from your favorite

loss of backing n. an abrupt collapse of trust in yourself—having abandoned a resolution, surrendered to your demons, or squandered an opportunity you swore you’d take seriously this time—which resets your expectations and makes it that much harder to guarantee that your

word is worth anything, even to yourself.

malotype n. a certain person who embodies all the things you like the least about yourself—a seeming caricature of your worst tendencies—which leaves you feeling repulsed and fascinated in equal measure, having stumbled upon

role model of exactly the kind of person you never want to be. Latin malus, bad + typus,

leidenfreude n. a sense of paradoxical relief when something bad happens to you, which temporarily lowers your own expectations for yourself, transforming a faceless protagonist into something of an underdog, who’s that much easier to root for.

a lot easier to be cheerful or crabby or crazy or boring if everyone already thinks of you that way.

sayfish n. a sincere emotion that seems to wither into mush as soon as you try to put it into words—like reeling in a shimmering beast from the deep only to watch it wriggle limply on the line, which makes you want to leave it down there, languishing unexpressed, where it’ll grow dark and slender and weird, with ghostly blue eyes and long translucent teeth.

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. From bitching, markedly good + fitch, the European polecat, an animal that often cripples its prey by piercing its brain with its teeth, before storing it alive in its burrow to return and eat sometime later.

solysium n. the unhinged delirium of being alone for an extended period of time—feeling the hours stretch into days until a weird little culture begins to form inside your head, with its own superstitions and alternate histories and a half-mumbled dialect all your own—whose freewheeling absurdity feels oddly liberating but makes it that much harder to reacclimate to the strictures and ambiguities of normal social life.

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. Acronym of the supposed

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 performance that might well end in disaster but would at least remind you that there are many different ways to play this

role, even though you tend to assume you’re just reading the lines as written. From vicarious, but without the I. Pronounced “vik-er-uhs.”

hiddled adj. feeling the loneliness of having to keep a secret

And 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

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,

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.

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.