Ever had this?

Have you people even encountered a situation where, no matter how you try to describe something, it doesn’t feel accurate? Like, for example, you’re having a feeling but you can’t explain how it feels, no matter what words or language you use?

How do you people overcome this?

All tips welcome! Thanks :blush:

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Usually I put in a placeholder word, such as ELEPHANT and sleep on it.

But I have struggled with descriptions a lot-usually I focus on that while revising.

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Yeah, fair. I guess it happens mainly when I can’t (or am too scared to) put it into words, even though I know what the thought or feeling is? It’s not usually scenarios in books, I’m talking more about philosophical shit.

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Do you journal on the side? It might help if you are able to express yourself through writing in a low-stakes environment that nobody else has to see.

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We do, sometimes. Although it’s more the fear of no one else being able to help us if we understand what we are experiencing. So maybe, it’s… something else.

—Veronika

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Oh, that’s normal, and I often don’t fight the unspeakable, too much. Southernized witticisms helps.

The smell of death is a normal course of decay, but it shouldn’t come from cooking pork, but what I smelled when cooking while pregnant with my second child was living death, a funk so malevolent it should clear a building, but it was only for me. (And thus, I cannot get closer than this.) But it’s sufficient.

What I write more about, that permeates my writing, is “The Great Empty” or “Loss”, the angles of which you cannot find yourself within a crowded room. That sense of losing belonging, not going back, needing a long-dead parent isn’t something that really distills to this paragraph, either.

But what I have is the bare-bones shape, the relation that allows people to see their own emptiness in, things like that.

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