Living Exulansis

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.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to talk about a strange emotion that I constantly have that I didn’t know there was a name for. Now that I’ve learned this word I can’t help but feeling that it validates many of my life experiences. After all, if there is a name for this, it means that I cannot be the only person on the planet that has felt this way. It’s nice not feeling alone.

All of my life, I have struggled to explain the way that I experience the world to others and have found that they often cannot relate to my experiences. I would talk about the way that a shirt tag made that shirt unwearable and I would get a blank stare in response. They had never experienced the itching and crawling on the back of your neck that’s makes thinking about anything else literally impossible. I find that many of my life experiences are like this.

Recently, this feeling has become a core part of my life.

As a nurse, working through the Covid pandemic has changed me in ways that I cannot explain to anyone that has not shared this experience. Who ever I was in 2020 did not come out on the other side. There is no explaining this to someone who wasn’t there and there is no need to explain it to someone who was. This leaves me holding this experience and not being able to talk about it in any meaningful way. So, I generally don’t.

This has created a strange separation of my life narrative and my actual lived experience. Not talking about a life changing event puts it into a realm where it seems like it didn’t actually happen and you are left finding it difficult where to place it within the shelves of your life. This makes reconciliation impossible. There is no way to line up all the feelings, beliefs and life views from this event with those that you share with other people. It makes it difficult to do this within yourself when you are not given the space to properly process that experience in a way that can allow you to place it on the proper shelf.

I feel this has created a strange wall inside of myself. There is now a part of me that I cannot share with others. Not because I don’t want to, but because they are not capable of understanding. Not because they are in any way failing. There are just some things in life that require lived experience to understand. In this case, I’m actually glad that most people I encounter don’t understand. I wish that I didn’t.

It is nice to know that others have felt this strange feeling. When you realize that there is no way that you can communicate to them this thing that now is a forever part of who you are. There are other emotions that are wrapped up in this one. There is resignation. Which leads to a touch of loneliness and isolation. Sometimes frustration. Sometimes despondency.

With this feeling comes the reminder that we can never know someone else or truly share ourselves with another person. There is so much of who we are that is wrapped up in our life experiences and our perceptions of the world. In the end, language fails to really communicate the experiences that we have. Which leads me to feelings catoptric tristesse.

the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect 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, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.

–The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Whatever it is that others think of me and who ever it is that they believe me to be, I know that it will be wrong because they cannot know and understand this important piece of myself. No matter how I try, I can never know who I have become in someone else’s mind and how different that is from the person I am within my own mind. This divide has always existed, but this life experience has widened that gap and brought my attention to the reality of this aspect of human relations.

All of this leads me to a better understanding of my alexithymia. While I can identify my emotions, I struggle to describe and express those emotions to others in a meaningful way. Thinking about this complexity of emotion has lead to the realization that language can never express what it is that we are feeling. My alexithymia is actually an extension of my difficulties with verbal pragmatics. Being able to express everything that I have written here verbally, on the spot without preparation or planning is something that I cannot achieve. Not because I don’t understand what I’m feeling, but because language is complex and nuanced, requiring careful consideration for accurate expression.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!