Sometimes a psychotherapy session is really just a collaborative quest to find the right word to demonstrate to your client that you have heard them and know exactly what they mean. If only there was an exact word to describe feeling the feeling of being alone in a crowd or the sense of peace that comes from being inside the house during a rainstorm. Well there is this awesome website called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows where John Koenig creates words to describe emotions like these. Here are 10 emotions that you have felt but can never describe. Which of these have you felt?
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.
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 campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
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n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
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 simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere 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 it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
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-up tension you understand perfectly.
n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known—Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.
n. the desire to hold on to time as it passes, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a river, feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders float on downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, “Just let go—it’s okay—let go.”
n. the awareness of how little of the world you will experience—Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
10 Emotions You Have Felt But Can Never Describe was a revelation for me. I have indeed felt many of these “obscure sorrows” but felt I was too sensitive, or put them down to an over-melancholic disposition. Seeing them, and resonating with them, and actually having words to describe them makes me feel much better about myself. So many of us feel we are essentially flawed in some way when. in fact, we are just being human. I am so impressed that I have not only bookmarked the page, but made notes for myself so that, in the future, when I think I am feeling some uniquely negative emotion, I will be reminded that as humans we all have pretty much the same feelings and rise above my negative self-observation.
By the way, I just finished (though am in no way finished with) “Hardcore Self Help”. That’s how I found this site. I have many of the classic self-help books, but Hardcore Self Help is excellent. It made me laugh, which is fantastic when caught in the grip of anxiety, and it gave me tools and determination.
The breathing exercise works! Whenever I had a frightening symptom I did the breathing exercise. The symptom would soon vanish. Well, if breathing could relieve it, it can only be anxiety and that greatly lessened my . . . anxiety. Well, if it is only anxiety, that’s not much to be anxious about. The book will be a great help in lessening the mental habits that caused the anxiety in the first place.
Two thumbs up for your work, and I just found you. Keep going, your help is very much needed.
The wish to understand someone fully though you are so different that you can only wonder “what goes on in his/her head?”
I think they should make a name for the feeling that combines anemoia and kenopsia.
Totally agree, that’s exactly the feeling the “the backrooms” image gives me
Being alone yet not feeling lonely and instead feeling at peace.
Being alone yet not feeling lonely.
I am wondering, is there a word describing “the feeling of anxiety melting/going away”?
love these words.
what the word for the feeling of late night drives and music
I feel Kenopsia could include places which were important to you. For example, High school campus after graduation, old office building, parents house and your original room. In summary, abandoned (may be temporary) places that played an important role growing up. I just marvel by how I feel in those circumstances… can’t really put it into words. Someone?
What a fascinating post. I came here looking for a word that describes the perfect cosiness of when you’ve just woken up.
being surrounded by friends and family but feeling lonely