37. Seven-ish Emotions From My Culture

(Epistemic status: There sure do seem to be a lot of folks from other Everett branches who washed up in this one, aren't there?)

It's not just words and sayings I bring from the culture and the [counterhistory] I surely wasn't actually drawn from, it's emotions as well. In particular, they're emotions which we would consider every bit as fundamental as irritation or delight or disdain are to American culture. Unfortunately, I don't have good terms for any of them, so I'll just have to describe them carefully.

1. You know the thing about "do it scared, do it messy, but do it"? An emotion that corresponds passably well to that. Or for another much closer point of reference, the sort of thing Luigi Mario seems to be experiencing constantly in the Luigi's Mansion series - sobbing and terrified and still sucking up one ghost to wail on another one with. Driving forward progress driven by a terror of stopping, with a side of near-total [emotional-core-containment] failure.

2. Feeling like you don't belong, don't matter, don't have much of a right to exist, let alone hang around in whatever social context you're in. Being easily buffeted around, talked over, or emotionally bruised. A little like being at the bottom of a well looking up; a little like being very short.

3. A sharp clear determination on beginning something both momentous and weakly timeboxed; a physical journey is the central example. A knowledge that you are setting off on some needful journey, literal or metaphorical; a gathering-together of one's energies and powers, ready to handle whatever trouble might arise, ready to walk a narrow and carefully-planned and well-provisioned path through time.

4. A kind of desolation that arises on encountering something that you might have had, had you made some choices somewhat differently, where the choices are ones that didn't feel all that momentous at the time or even like choices at all, and the things you encounter are things you'd given up hoping for or had forgotten you wanted. The feeling of coming across a [house that burned down] without your knowing it, in the counterfactuals sense.

5. A feeling of glory, of competence, of near-invulnerability. A sense of drive and power, that nothing could stop you from taking what you want and doing what you will in the world, of motion and dynamism, of the capacity to crash through obstacles and swat aside the slingstones and arrows of misfortune and disruption.

6. The gut-wrenching sick feeling of being delivered something wonderful that you'd stopped hoping for, that you forgot that you wanted, that you'd started resignedly trimming away your desire for. The feeling of getting everything you ever wanted too late, by a decade or by three months, too late for it to have the same resonance for you, or for you not to have started burning your hope for fuel just to keep warm.

7. A feeling like staring into the sun, or like the jagged loose bits of your soul scratching your insides. "Advanced yearning", as VPV refers to this feeling; "all things sharp and shining", as B put it. A sense of intense yearning, of wanting something incredibly badly; so badly, in fact, that the wanting itself hurts to hold on to, to keep space for. The emotion that captures the double-bind between wanting something that feels alive to you and knowing painfully in your gut that holding out hope for the satisfaction of that desire is probably foolish.

I might have added the several variants of curiosity that my culture recognizes, from [knowledge-limerence] to [checking-it-out] to [workself-ingestion] to [problem-solvent] to [catching-the-scent], among others, but those all map too closely together to easily separate for American culture.

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