Exulansis
Latin exulāns, exile
Exulansis refers to giving up on talking about an experience because the people around you cannot relate to it. Met with envy, pity, or simple incomprehension, the experience goes untold, and over time it drifts loose from the rest of your story until it feels distant and out of place, even to you.
First principles
Exulansis is an experience sent into exile because no one could take it in.
The experience is real, but it finds nowhere to land in other people, so you stop offering it. What goes unspoken does not disappear. It drifts apart from the rest of your story and wanders, kept but no longer shared.
At its core, it asks:
- What happened that no one could hold?Name the experience you have stopped bringing up.
- Why did it fail to land?Notice whether listeners met it with envy, pity, or plain unfamiliarity.
- Where could it be told?Look for the listener, or the page, that could give it a place in your story again.
Etymology
- exulāns
- exile, wanderer
The word exulansis is a modern coinage, not an old word handed down from Latin. The American writer John Koenig invented it for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, his collection of new words for emotions that have no name, published as a book in 2021. He drew it from the Latin exulāns meaning "exile" or "wanderer," which he took from Diomedea exulans, the scientific name of the wandering albatross, a bird that spends most of its life in flight and rarely lands. The ending -sis, which English uses to name a process or condition, turns it into a noun.