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dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters that you had originally skimmed through to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

Emphasis mine.

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your society as a seal on the beach—lumbering, clumsy, resting often, easily distracted, huddled in the presence of other misfits—unable to recognize the nearby ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.