Every November, when I’ve forgotten how December fills with stockpiled tasks like a Candy Crush screen of stale peppermints, I imagine I’ll read six books over the break. Every year, I get through half a book. This year, though, it felt like a win. It was the dictionary.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig is not a typical dictionary; it’s a compendium of new words to describe the human experience--like etherness:
n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won’t always be this way—that the coming years will steadily break people away from their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time when you’ll look back and try to imagine what it felt like to have everyone together in the same place.
From ether, an intoxicating compound that evaporates very quickly + togetherness.
Or Xeno:
n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a warm smile, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of being alone.
From Ancient Greek xenos, alien, stranger.
I share this to say: On this new node of an unfolding global pandemic spiral, we need new words. We need words to describe and legitimate our grief and sorrow, our anger and impatience, our worry and fear. We need terms like allostatic load to describe what this experience of never-ending-pandemic does to the body—even at rest, even when we’re with our families, even on ‘break.’ But we also need words to describe how allostatic load feels in bodies, our psyches, our families, and our communities.
We need words to describe how cynical business-as-usual feels but also how much we want to eat in restaurants, gather in groups, fly on planes and resume life in some recognizable form. We need words that acknowledge how split we actually are in our approach to reaching endemicity—since this plays out in our very school and community. When we look at the past two years in toto, we need words that capture the brutality of America’s individualism. We need fearless words that acknowledge how we each maintain it. And we need words that explain how bereft and immobilized it makes us feel. As it turns out, there is a new word for that:
Kuebiko:
n. a state of exhaustion inspired by senseless tragedies and acts of violence, which force you to abruptly revise your expectations of what can happen in this world, trying to prop yourself up like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams yet powerless to do anything but stand and watch.
In Japanese mythology, Kuebiko is the name of a kami deity, a scarecrow who stands all day watching the world go by, which has made him very wise but locked in place.
The power to create language is the power to create new worlds. In our classes, we teach Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy: “Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.” This break, I also remembered how shared language allows us to narrate our shared sorrows. It allows us, in Brown’s words, to “practice generosity and vulnerability” and “to make the connections between [us] clear, open, available, durable.”
As we head into winter term, I want to acknowledge the exhaustion of the prolonged stress with which we are dealing. I want to encourage each of us to find joy and community when and where we can. I invite us to set boundaries around our time and energy; to say no to demands not aligned with our health and well-being; and to say yes to connections and activities that nourish and sustain us. We are not having the same experience, but we are all existing in history together. The more intentionally we are in relationship, the better history’s eventual course.
Wishing you all health and at least one moment of suerza in 2022:
n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
A combination of the Spanish suerte, luck + fuerza, force: