Monomania

[kiramori]

There are feelings that are so elusive they are exempt from the privilleges of being known by a name. Much in the same manner, there are feelings that some languages fail to capture, while others dedicate a significant space on the collective counciousness just to register it's existance. I find it fascinating to study about feelings that doesn't exist, and even more interesting is to experience an entire new feeling. Is it really new? Is it a mixture concocted by the particularities of your mind at that exact time and place? No matter, feelings are hard to describe. Feelings aren't euclidian concepts, you can feel cozy, sorrowful, pungent and a deep sense of agony all at the same time.

There's a distinct feeling uncaptured by language, that of waking up, pacing about like you expect something to go wrong. Open your doors and windows with a deep, overwhelming fright, expecting to be punished, to be mauled by something foreign to you, yet, nothing happens. You feel the brew of things inside you warn that something wrong is going to happen, but everything is fine. You know you deserve what's about to happen, and you know it will happen, yet you stand unharmed at a silent, barren land; No calm, no storm. You can only hope that the inevitable doesn't happen, and you begin to convince yourself it might not, because you don't deserve this and never will. Yet, it does happen. All of a sudden you feel the weight crushing you, you feel your body getting mauled by everything you thought you saw before. It's as horrible as you imagined, but you feel vindicated, you feel right for about the only time since this has begun. So you feel comfort in your demise, no more anxiety, paranoia, sorrowful days and nights. It's the vindication of being freed from your crippling anxiety driven mania.

Now, I don't like that feeling at all. Yet, it's fascinating that something so specific can become it's own concept.

Saudade it's when the bittersweetness of missing and profoundly longing something is mixed with the happiness of the memory itself in a way that makes you nostalgic and incomplete. Schadenfreude it's feeling happiness at someone's demise, it's called "Mono no Aware" when you get to glimpse and feel awe at the beauty of the ephemeral. The call of the void is the dark side of your mind that yells "jump!" when you look over a ledge, and Hygge is the cozyness of a day with friends, blankets, warming fires and happiness unbound.

Some feelings are hard to put into words, so what do we do? We make them a word. Longing for a place you've never been is called Fernweh, while feeling nostalgia for something you've never lived is Anemoia. A Deja Vu is feeling something foreign as oddly familliar, while a Jamais Vu is just about the opposite. Feelings can be as abstract as the sorrow carried throught a generation, expressed as Han, or as specific as a Kalsarikännit. No feeling is individual, no experience is unique and that's why humans can relate.

People who lack empathy could never understand a feeling they've never personally felt and could never hope to understand what Yūgen means. Sometimes I feel like I feel too much, but feelings are beautiful and are the building blocks of humanity. Humans are little more than sorrowful rocks made of unresolved trauma and lots and lots of hope at the face of an uncaring and un-nurturing universe. Discover feelings, create words, don't be bound by what you are taught. Feel something no one has ever felt, and then find out some unemployed teenager describing precisely that feeling in a tumblr post. Learn how to feel; Life's too hard for uncaring bastards and for those blank faced emotionally detached youthful adults who are "too sharp" to wrap themselves around. Be chronically unhinged, be dramatic, be sensual and indecent, maybe you'll might end up being happy.

but yeah what do I know.

Comments

[therealtrash]

This is so real. I often gaslight myself into believing that what I'm feeling doesn't exist, and that I'm not actually feeling it, because I can't even describe what it is or how it works. It's strange; the very term "gaslighting" is a concept many people weren't familiar with. But now this word has gained more visibility, although I firmly believe it has always existed alongside humanity. The point is that there's an infinite number of feelings that we haven't yet labeled or understood, but that many people have already experienced at least once. They simply prefer to ignore them or think they're something simpler, for fear of encountering something so new and complex. Indeed, very intriguing.