Words that Make Us

Dear Diary,

I read in a book once that if you cannot find the words to describe how you feel, you should make your own words. I have always had this feeling in me where I want to grab someone by their shoulders and rattle them maniacally until they comprehend how I am feeling. For a long time, I used poetry to expel this brute, raw burst of emotions bubbling in the cauldron of my soul. And yet, I was oblivious to understanding that poetry was also just a chaotic tool, and what really was instrumental in capturing my emotions was the most fundamental and simple part of language: words.

There really is a two-way relationship between words and us. We define words, and those words eventually define us. I am Lex. I have anxiety. I don’t know what is going on with my life. Look at the last three sentences. How meticulously calculated and crafted is a language that three simple ideas harbour themselves through a bunch of words that define who I am! An entire existence photographed for eternity in this Diary!

This realization – that language is necessary to capture one’s identity – I call this feeling ‘ideaneal’. And it is the first word I have created.

Ideaneal (noun) – The realization that language is necessary and instrumental in defining our existence.

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PART 1: CHERRY-CRUSH

Lex sat at the round conference table, opposite the large projector screen, his leg twitching and his fingers nervously slithering through each other. There was a coffee cup and a dead fly in front of him – both of those not helping with how anxious he was feeling. He’d been grating his teeth so hard for the past few days that he had a locked jaw, and he wondered if he could even give this research presentation at all. As the other members walked in one by one, Lex sneakily rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a blue stress ball, smothering it in sync with his heartbeat. Everyone but her was now in the room. There was a reason he had gotten up early, shaved (twice!) and worn his favourite dark green sweater that finally made him feel pretty. She was the only one who could calm him now.

“What do you have for us?” a voice drew Lex’s attention. Lex turned his head to his supervisor – Yuri, who sat there with his greasy forehead, molten scalp and ill-fitted, yellow-stained sweater. What did he know about how Lex was feeling? All he cared about was this stupid presentation.

Where was she? Where was Eileen?

“Shouldn’t we wait for Eileen?” Lex finally blurted out. “I’d like to present my work in front of everyone.” The curtains gently swayed, and beams of sun pinched their way into the room, bouncing off the oaky table, the decrepit, white walls and the nine curious faces from Lex’s research team. “Eileen has a commitment elsewhere today. She won’t be joining us for this meeting,” Yuri said.

Fuck! Lex thought to himself. His breath cascaded into shallow grunts and gasps as his shoulder rose and plummeted like waves crashing onto massive boulders. Even with the large windows and the hordes of people on the other side of it, Lex felt like someone had wrapped him up in a wooden crate and buried him inside a piano committed to playing the most dissonant chord. Each second and each whisper seemed like a cacophonous assault on his senses. His stomach churned voraciously, his lips trembled unceasingly, and his eyes stung incessantly.

“Lex?” Yuri asked, shuffling in his seat. Lex’s sweaty palms gently ran over the pocket-diary tucked in his jacket. It’ll be okay; you are prepared for this, Lex reminded himself as he inhaled deeply. Like Lex, four other undergraduates – including Eileen – were in the research team. Yuri – the supervisor – and the remaining graduate students would understand if Lex made a tiny error. Would they not? After all, the skeletal editing of pharmaceutical medicines was complex.

“I’ve been running simulations-” Lex started. All eyes were on him now, and he knew he was being judged. It is scary to sit in a room full of people who have their life together and don’t spend sleepless nights regretting a decision they made five years ago in the spur of the moment. It is haunting to sit in a room full of people who don’t feel insecure and foolish every time they get an answer wrong. It is uncomfortable to sit in a room full of people who don’t think you should be there at all. That is how Lex felt.

“-the models fit well,” Lex continued.

It is this nerve-racking feeling of not being enough and loveable that made Lex look for a part of himself in others. Eileen was not the first person Lex had unfairly used to delude himself into feeling better. It had first happened in third grade when Lex was still deeply engrossed in excavating the treasures of his nose or using so much hair oil that when the mid-day heat arrived, it was difficult to judge whether his temples were home to sweat or coconut hair oil. There was a girl he had liked back then, and even though Lex had no idea what weddings even entailed of, those bells had already gone off in his head. So, one day, Lex decided to confess his feelings to her, only to be bombarded with two words that would haunt him forever: ‘too brown’. Since then, Lex had treated falling in love as a quest to prove he was enough. That someone like him could also be loved back.

“-The direct nitrogen deletion of secondary amines,” Lex went on.

Perhaps a research presentation is the wrong place to have an epiphany about love, but in that moment, with Eileen missing, Lex wondered why he was trying to find the missing puzzle piece of his own game on someone else’s chessboard. Why was he fooling himself to fall in love with people he had just met? All because an insane fantasy would distract him from himself and his thoughts. Love isn’t about change; it’s about being yourself, Lex thought. And so, what Lex felt for Eileen probably wasn’t love but the number one reason to seek a therapist.

Lex concluded the presentation within ten minutes. “Good work,” Yuri said. At first, Lex thought that Yuri was feigning praise, but did it really matter? Lex knew he’d done well, and though he still felt like he did not belong in this room, complaining about it wasn’t really the solution. Clinging on to fantasies he created with other people wasn’t the answer.

Cherry-crush, Lex thought to himself, making sure he’d write it down in his Diary later. 

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Dear Diary,

I defined the word cherry-crush today.

Cherry-crush (noun) – A person you fantasize about to falsely give yourself the illusion of being valuable.

When I defined the word and quantified my feelings for Eileen, I wondered if I had any feelings at all to begin with. This epiphany, or this benightment that I have escaped – I am not sure if that is because this confusing feeling itself has lost its ability to haunt me, or it is because I had no feelings to begin with.

I wonder if all feelings are meant to be defined at all. I know it is quite early into the process to be having this thought. After all, I have just one word down till now. But here’s the thing – once you define a feeling, you lose the rawness. It’s like trapping a djinn in a pocket lamp. Do feelings really need to have their souls trapped in diminutive words?

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PART 2: PROXIMITANCE

There were no windows in the glass office on the fifth floor of Lex’s undergraduate department. There were, however, myriads of cubicles, all of them partitioned by gray fabric and pinboards that jostled with memos and photos. When Lex entered the glass office, he was first greeted by Lightning McQueen. As he turned and walked towards the corner of the office, he saw Buzz Lightyear, a Hot Wheels truck with two missing wheels, a headless Spider-Man toy, and the skull from Hamlet, all because each cubicle was marked by its own desk toy. Lex finally reached the cubicle without desk toys. Lex preferred emptiness: it meant more space. Lex hung his backpack on the hook adjacent to the desk, heaving a sigh of relief as his body sank into his chair.

Slowly, the keyboard clicks began wafting their way to Lex as he stared directly overhead at the fluorescent yellow lights over him. Lex did not know why, but he always preferred emptiness. Walking the world without leaving traces of yourself on everything you touched felt like a superpower. It made the world around him feel a little bit more secure so that even if this desk was taken from him the next day, he wouldn’t feel attached enough to mourn its loss. All Lex needed on his desk was his nameplate and the mandatory notice from the department listing all the resources available to undergraduates.

Lex pulled out his laptop, and gently placed it on his desk, cracking his neck like a fighter about to enter the wrestling ring. Frustratingly, he kept trying to reconnect to the Wi-Fi, but the network would not budge. Lex could have gone down to work in his research lab, which was usually empty and had much better Wi-Fi. Still, for some unexplainable reason, Lex preferred working in the cubicles.

A coffee machine was on the other corner of the office, whirring grotesquely. Was it the machine that made him want to stay here? Lex shut his eyes and heard other undergraduates from his department gather there, exchanging stories about their lives. One person had just gone surfing over the weekend, another had explored this abandoned mall, and another had driven six hours to Big Sur with their partner. Lex wondered what he had done over the weekend. Well, he had first binge-watched Scavengers Reign; he had read the book ‘Circe’; he’d made chicken pasta. God, why was his life so mundane?

Lex did not know the other undergraduates well enough to walk up to the coffee machine, but hearing their stories made him feel like he was leaving his monotonous world behind. Somehow, even though he knew no one in the cubicles, their presence made him feel comfortable. He did not have to necessarily interact with them to feel their presence rubbing off on him. They did not have to know about his crippling anxiety or his fear of not being enough. They had to know nothing, yet he – like a parasite – could drain in the basket of their laughter. It was an awful thing to do. But he loved it. And he had a word for it. 

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Dear Diary,

Here’s my new word:

Proximitance (noun) – The feeling of being comfortable in the presence of people without wanting to interact with them.

I don’t think I have elaborated much on what I do as part of my research. So, imagine a cake and let that cake be a molecule. Now imagine a topping (say cherry) on top of the cake. That topping is the functional group, and as of now, we biologists have been able to alter the functional group to change the flavour of the cake. But what my group seeks to do is to amend the cake itself. The cake is the skeleton of the molecule. Hence, I work on the skeletal editing of molecules, especially those in the pharmaceutical industry.

I bring up skeletal editing because I believe etymology is exactly like skeletal editing. You change the root of a word and capture an entirely new feeling you did not even know you felt. I remember arguing in my last entry that encapsulating complex emotions with simple words robs these emotions of their complexity. But I never questioned what this ‘complexity’ is! I think emotions are complex only because we do not have a way to acknowledge them.

What better way to acknowledge complex feelings than to define new words. For instance, I always knew I enjoyed proximitance, but before today, I never knew that I felt it. I have finally acknowledged a part of me today by simply describing it with a word. And if I feel like the word ‘proximitance’ does not fully capture my feelings, I’ll skeletal-edit a new word! Oh, in fact, I think skeletal-edit might be another new word I just made up.

Skeletal-edit (verb) – To alter something by its root and give that something an entirely new identity.

There is no boundary on how many words I can define, just like there is no boundary on how many emotions I can feel!

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PART 3: SONGSCAPE

The engine’s hauntingly shrill sound reverberated everywhere, and the tumultuous shocks were felt everywhere, from the backpacks dangling from the overhead cabins to the dashing food cart and the concerned air hostess running after it. On this seventeen-hour flight, a three-year-old baby was whining nonchalantly for the past seven hours. And to top it all off, an airsick woman sat beside Lex. Only fifteen minutes ago, when the pilot had declared that the plane was championing through rough weather, this old woman had begun vomiting all over her food plate. Lex had offered her ginger ale and medicine, but both were quick to join their regurgitated companions in the overflowing food tray.

Lex was visiting his parents for the Holidays, and it had been a year since he had seen them last. Honestly, he’d imagined a more grandiose setting to return home under. Lex had an urge to escape, but there was no apparent way out of this metal can. And then, almost by its own accord, Lex’s body started moving on its own.

His hands dug deep into his pocket and pulled out his phone, swiping hurriedly through his apps until they opened the music app and rushed through the downloaded music library. There was a summary of his listening hours, and Lex briefly scanned it to surmise that he’d spent 89,310 minutes in 2023 listening to just music. 89,310 minutes…that meant around 3700 hours…or about 60 days. That’s too much music for one man, Lex sighed. But then the word escape banged deep into his skull, yelling at him for more music. Lex dug his earphones deep into his ears, quickly putting his favourite artist, Ratbag’s song Rats in my walls for the 113th time this year.

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Dear Diary,

Music has this magical ability to lyrically enchant people. Each piece of lyric speaks specially to you. It is so uncanny how each music ‘tastes’ different to each of us, isn’t it? How many times do we engage with music to escape our real-life problems? When I had my heart broken recently, I listened to Tessa Violet’s Crush for three weeks without a break. When I am angry at my roommate for not washing his dishes on time, I listen to Rainbow Frog Biscuit’s Help Me to calm myself down. And I keep returning to the same piece of music for the same reason – a reason worthy enough for its own word.

Songscape (noun) – Using music as an emotion-based coping to escape overwhelming emotions.

But reporting this new word isn’t all that I have to mention to you today. After reaching home the next day, my mom forced me to attend a dinner party at her office, where I met a few other ‘victims’ like me. And instead of standing silently and staring at each other, I decided to bring up the word songscape. Funnily enough, there was one other person who really understood what I meant.

It made me realize that making up new words is also an act of validating my experiences and attempting to build relationships. If only I could come up with four words in a few months, imagine what eight billion others like me are capable of. Imagine how many feelings are yet to be felt because we cannot articulate them.