Although.
Although, something was different. I had a few extra minutes to spare. So I decided to entertain myself by opening my laptop and searching up this exact phrase.
"word for feeling out of place"
Why? I've always felt just out of place. Not an outcast, not a lone wolf. Just out of place. Barely. In all honesty, I can't be the only one who feels this way. Isn't it what every person feels like at some point in their life? When you feel like you are the same as everyone else in the room, yet there's something, something so amazingly minuscule, that sets you apart? Something that makes you feel just a little emptier every day. Something that makes you feel like you are all alone in the world. Something that makes you wonder if you will ever fit in?
Of course, I wasn't going to get any answers by searching all of that up. So I searched up,
"word for feeling out of place"
I did not think that the word I was looking for would come up. Then again, I didn't exactly know what word I was looking for. I clicked on a link to one of the top websites. Pinterest. I highly doubted that I would find something on Pinterest. It seemed too upbeat and happy to have a word so deep and thoughtful. But I tried anyway. I went through ten posts, then twenty, then thirty. After what seemed like too long-yet only a couple minutes- something caught my eye. A website by John Koenig. He's a graphic designer who created the website The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It's a vast collection of made up words that can describe the complexity of emotions created and/or felt by the human mind.
The word that caught my eye? Monachopsis.
Quoting John Koenig,
Monachopsis
"the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach-lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you'd be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home."
What a beautiful word. It seemed to me as if the word itself... was out of place. The beauty of it, I feel, was that it described how I felt exactly. It got me thinking. Am I not meant for where I am?
Am I supposed to be somewhere else? Do I not belong here? Maybe I was born in the wrong time. Wrong place, wrong time. Or maybe is there something wrong with me? Did the universe do something different when it created me? Why do I hurt so much, yet so little at the same time? When I try to tell people that I feel out of place, I can't. I can't because I don't feel so out of place that it should worry anyone. It's like... too little, too much. This is, without a doubt, monachopsis.
But I know that it will end. This empty feeling, this feeling that I'm a daisy in a rosebush. This feeling that I don't belong. How do I know this? Because everything comes to an end. And I know this will too. So if anyone out there feels this way, if anyone can relate to "monachopsis", I assure you, it WILL get better.
Thank you so much for reading. I'll be posting more soon.
Lots of love,
Luv
