The Feeling (December 2022)

Thanks for reading this year :) See u in 2023!

Lately, I have been thinking about something I secretly call the “yuh-oh” feeling. I don’t know if the “yuh-oh” feeling is universal. But it feels like it could be. It has a specific route it travels. It calls from your brain, deep down into your belly. It wants to move you somewhere to do something immediately. It’s vague and confusing but it says you must get down to the business in some way or another. Whatever that means.

The “yuh-oh” feeling feels specific based on the way in-which you deliver the “yuh-oh” in your head when the feeling arises. 

Sometimes the “yuh-oh” feeling  is like “yuh-oh!!! your mental health seems to be absolutely collapsing at this very moment!!! You seem to be going crazy or something!!! ARE YOU PSYCHOTIC?!?!?! You are not making any sense to anyone around you! You are absolutely making a fool of yourself at all times. People are just tolerating you because they feel bad.”

Sometimes the “yuh-oh” is like- “yuh-oh, looks like its time to move far far away…”

Other times the  “yuh-oh” is like, “Yu-oh!!!!!!! Remember that thing you did that one time that maybe was WRONG? You know, like a mistake???  A thing that lots of people make, but maybe that because  you made that mistake it means you’re  also capable of bigger, scarier mistakes like TAX FRAUD or MANSLAUGHTER.”

And then there are the  “yuh-oh” feelings that come out of left-field in a way that doesn’t fully make sense. Sometimes the yuh-oh feeling shows up when you’re lying in bed surrounded by crisp white sheets. You’re stroking their hair back behind their ear and noticing their freckles up-close for the first time.
This version of the yuh-oh feeling is highly addictive. 

Again, I have not yet found the word for the Yuh-Oh feeling. Sometimes there are no words for certain feelings. Maybe this is just intuition?

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In 2015, when I was in  college, I worked on a devised-theater project called “Domestic Rubutosis”. 

“Rubutosis, noun, german; the unsettling feeling of one’s own heartbeat.”

We thought it was so profound that this word didn’t have a meaning in english. How beautiful to have a feeling that is so specific that only a few groups of people  have figured out how to describe it with language.

After some fact-checking on my 21 year-old self, I  discovered that this word is 100% made up by a teen on tumblr. It is only recognized as a real world on “wiktionary”. 

I will not shit on wiktionary though. I recently learned that now TEACHERS are allowed to use wikipedia to source facts. The cardinal rule of my western schooling experience spanning between 1998-2012 has shattered. Wikipedia is a precedent now!... So who’s to say that Wiktionary will beat out Webster’s in the year 2032? 

For me, it is easiest to communicate my emotions through images and moving my body. If I want to tell someone I like them, I will jump up and down and flail my arms. I will hold up a giant poster of their face surrounded by sparkly heart stickers. Some sort of hopeful, bouncy tune will be playing on a Hello Kitty boombox. I am rhythmically moving my body to every nuanced element of the song, Using my facial expressions to tell a story my words can’t. I wish I could do this all of the time but alas I live in a world obsessed with words.

A lot of times figuring out the right words feels like a puzzle to me. Maybe because words and letters kind of remind me of math, and I had an IEP for math in school. When I’m reading something, I have to take the words I’m reading, process them into visual representation of the thing, and imagine what it feels and looks like in order to absorb it. It’s even harder with writing, because I have to think about the feelings and how it feels and then rolodex through all of the words in my brain’s inventory to find the correct ones to craft the story I am trying to tell. 

So what I’m getting at is… language is sort of like… Maybe Its kinda like… love? I make this face:

I have experienced a type of love that feels a lot like my relationship with words and writing. The feeling is so obviously there, but there is no way to make sense of it. The Feelings between the two individuals is vast and knows no bounds, but there is not yet a medium that exists to make it make sense. There is no way to render the feeling into something substantial or hardy, like a family, or a house, or a dog named cowboy, or a million dollars, or a table with mid-century modern legs. It’s confusing because it feels really good, but in actuality it has no ground to stand on.

When I lost this kind of love, I chose to seal myself into a human-sized hamster ball that smelled like piss and run 100 miles away. It took about 8 months to travel this way, but now I’m on the other side. I am unscrewing the cap, climbing out, and taking a shower.

I am wet and naked as I sit by a wood burning fireplace.Out the window, I can see the love that I was once giving and receiving 100 miles away, though it appears smaller because of perspective, It’s finally clear.

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Sometimes, I hear a voice of a young girl in my head telling me that all the change that’s happened to me this year is for the best. She tells me I will be okay.

I’m seeing the young girl a little clearer now she is letting me know that even though I made a super self-indulgent piece of work based on a tumblr meme in 2016, it was all worth it in the progression forward of the best invention since the iPhone, “wiktionary”. 

“Just you wait” she says as she points to a small iPhone screen that is just now, simply, a  biological part of her palm. The screen shows the Wikitonary page for a word called “Yuh-Oh” 

“Yuh-oh” a feeling that is all feelings together at once rushing to your brain and body. Sometimes called anxiety, sometimes called love, sometimes called pain. Maybe its just the feeling of really living? Of letting yourself hurt and heal in the gayest ways imaginable. It’s okay that there’s not a proper word for this feeling. An onomatopoeia of the bodily reaction it evokes is just enough.

I see the little girl again but it’s an earlier time she is sitting on the green carpeted floor of her strawberry stenciled bedroom. she is pulling at the fuzz of the carpet, her face is tightened by evaporating tears. Someone is in the doorway crying,

“I know you love me, I don’t feel like you LIKE me”.

 “that’s how I feel too”