Feelings You Didnt Know Had a Name

We feel more than we have the language to articulate and express, which is in itself profoundly frustrating. People work through emotions past being able to place them and utilise them as signals. A lot of the time, nosotros're left in the nighttime. Enter the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the abstraction of writer John Koenig, who is here to give you words for the feelings you may not have even known you lot were having. Here are 40 words to describe your emotions.

Onism

northward. the awareness of how piffling of the world you'll experience. Imagine standing in forepart of the departures screen at an airdrome, flickering over with foreign place names like other people's passwords, each representing one more matter you'll never get to see earlier you dice—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

Mal de Coucou

n. a miracle in which you have an active social life but very few shut friends—people who you can trust, who y'all can exist yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of astute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you'll still experience pangs of hunger.

Sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and circuitous as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly effectually you like an anthill sprawling deep secret, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that y'all'll never know existed, in which you lot might appear just once, equally an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at sunset.

Hanker Sore

adj. finding a person so attractive it actually kinda pisses you off.

Chrysalism

n. the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-upwardly tension you understand perfectly.

Altschmerz

n. weariness with the same old issues that yous've ever had—the same tiresome flaws and anxieties you lot've been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with zip interesting left to recollect about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig upward some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

Occhiolism

n. the awareness of the smallness of your perspective, past which you lot couldn't possibly describe any meaningful conclusions at all, almost the world or the by or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, information technology still only has a sample size of one, and may end up existence the command for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.

Ambedo

n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you go completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering downwards a window, tall trees leaning in the air current, clouds of foam swirling in your coffee—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an deed that is done purely for its own sake.

Nodus Tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn't brand sense to y'all anymore—that although yous idea you lot were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages yous don't understand, that don't even seem to belong in the aforementioned genre—which requires y'all to become dorsum and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the adept parts, only to acquire that all along you lot were supposed to choose your own hazard.

Liberosis

north. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to terminate glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you lot before y'all attain the stop zone—rather to concur your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping information technology in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the easily of trusted friends, ever in play.

Vemödalen

due north. the frustration of photographing something astonishing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the aforementioned sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can plough a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of article of furniture you happen to accept assembled yourself.

Kairosclerosis

northward. the moment yous realize that y'all're currently happy—consciously trying to bask the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, selection it apart and put information technology in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it'due south little more than an palatableness.

Vellichor

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of fourth dimension—filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, leap and dated and papered over like an quondam room the writer abandoned years agone, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Rückkehrunruhe

due north. the feeling of returning domicile after an immersive trip just to find it fading apace from your sensation—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so brilliant just days ago—which makes you lot wish you could smoothly cross-deliquesce back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, then all your days would run together and y'all'd never accept to call cutting.

Nighthawk

n. a recurring thought that merely seems to strike you lot late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you lot attempt to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, but to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to stop your coffee, passing the fourth dimension past quietly edifice a nest.

Expressionless Reckoning

due north. to detect yourself bothered by someone's death more than than you would take expected, every bit if y'all assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the dark it suddenly goes dark, leaving yous with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, just feeling all that much more afloat.

Pâro

n. the feeling that no matter what you lot practise is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to brand your style comfortably through the earth volition only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there'southward some obvious manner forward that everybody else tin can see but you, each of them leaning dorsum in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.

Midsummer

n. a feast celebrated on the mean solar day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires equally a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they've barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds yous of the coming snow.

Adronitis

due north. frustration with how long information technology takes to get to know someone—spending the kickoff few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that yous could start at that place and work your mode out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until y'all've built upwardly enough mystery over the years to inquire them where they're from, and what they practice for a living.

Rigor Samsa

n. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect yous from hurting and contain your anxieties, but e'er ends upward cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back once again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held upwards by a potent and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

Silience

northward. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you lot every mean solar day, usually—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned equally masterpieces if only they'd been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking cached jewels that may not exist flawless simply are withal somehow perfect.

Fitzcarraldo

north. an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain—peradventure done at that place by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual chat—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling dorsum and forth in your caput similar a dog stuck in a machine that's well-nigh to arrive dwelling, but itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality.

Keyframe

due north. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time merely ended upward mark a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a serial of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until unabridged years of your memory can be compressed into a scattering of enduring images—which prevents y'all from rewinding the past, merely allows you lot to move forward without countless buffering.

Gnossienne

n. a moment of sensation that someone you've known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the within, a stairway leading to a wing of the firm that you lot've never fully explored—an unfinished cranium that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a main primal, or any fashion of knowing exactly where you stand up.

Anecdoche

n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words similar a game of Scrabble, with each thespian borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increment their own score, until nosotros all run out of things to say.

Catoptric Tristesse

n. the sadness that you'll never really know what other people think of y'all, whether good, bad or if at all—that although nosotros reverberate on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we're coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, badly trying to expect itself in the eye.

Anemoia

n. nostalgia for a fourth dimension you lot've never known. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where y'all could sit down on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before whatever of united states arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we exercise, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, experience the same claret in their veins—and live in a completely different globe.

Mimeomia

n. the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it's unfair, even if everyone else feels the same style—each of u.s.a. fob-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a condom and predictable costume because we're tired of answering the question, "What are you supposed to be?"

Monachopsis

n. the subtle but persistent feeling of beingness out of place, every bit maladapted to your surroundings every bit a seal on a beach—lumbering, impuissant, hands distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which yous'd be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at habitation.

Semaphorism

due north. a conversational hint that y'all take something personal to say on the subject but don't become any farther—an emphatic nod, a half-told chestnut, an enigmatic 'I know the feeling'—which you lot identify into conversations similar those little flags that warn diggers of something buried secret: maybe a cable that secretly powers your house, maybe a fiberoptic link to some strange land.

Énouement

n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where y'all can finally get the answers to how things plough out in the real globe—who your baby sis would go, what your friends would end upward doing, where your choices would lead y'all, exactly when you'd lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn't already made the journey, equally if there was some part of yous who had volunteered to stay behind, who was yet stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

Daguerreologue

n. an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself, an enigmatic figure who still lives in the grainy and color-warped house you grew up in, who may well spend a lot of their day wondering where you are and what y'all're doing now, like an old grandma whose kids live far abroad and don't call much anymore.

Fata Organa

n. a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting beyond the room, idly locked in the middle of some group conversation, their eyes glinting with vulnerability or quiet apprehension or cosmic boredom—as if you could see backstage through a gap in the defunction, watching stagehands belongings their ropes at the set up, actors in costume mouthing their lines, fragments of bizarre sets waiting for another product.

Avenoir

due north. the desire that memory could flow backward. Nosotros take it for granted that life moves frontward. Just y'all movement as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can run into where you've been, but non where you're going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of y'all. Information technology's difficult not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way…

Kenopsia

n. the eerie, forlorn temper of a place that's usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes information technology seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent-minded they glow like neon signs.

The Tilt Shift

n. a miracle in which your lived experience seems oddly inconsequential once you lot put information technology down on paper, which turns an epic tragicomedy into a sequence of figures on a model train set, assembled in their tiny classrooms and workplaces, wandering along their own cautious and well-trodden paths—peaceable, generic and out of focus.

Jouska

n. a hypothetical conversation that y'all compulsively play out in your head—a well-baked analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more securely with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Ecstatic Daze

due north. the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone y'all similar—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts y'all to chase that feeling with a kite and a fundamental.

Heartworm

n. a relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned army camp whose smoldering embers nevertheless take the ability to first a forest burn.

Xeno

n. the smallest measurable unit of measurement of man connection, typically exchanged betwixt passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh most some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but withal comprise powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

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When Yous're Ready, This Is How You Heal

Healing is not a i-fourth dimension event.

Brianna Wiest'due south newest book of essays volition help you find your inner sanctum and embark on the path of truthful transformation. Wiest'southward words are a balm for whatsoever soul on the journeying of their own becoming.

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Source: https://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-wiest/2016/02/40-words-for-emotions-youve-felt-but-couldnt-explain/

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