Żal. Dor. Toska. Hiraeth. Saudade. Appocundria.

These words are the remnants of what we lose when we try to translate the human heart into a single, sterile language. They remind us that sadness is not one emotion, but an entire scale. I often think of them. Far too often, for melancholy has become my most persistent emotion, my baseline itself.

Like an unwanted guest overextending their stay, it becomes difficult to push them away without painting oneself in a negative light, and yet, as it strengthens its hold onto me, the easier it becomes to push everyone away, a reminder of how little I trust most these days.

Maybe I’ve become too closed within myself, only showing my world within through my writings, or my skills in ways that are far less useful than they courbe productive, as I’ve grown to value myself only as far as I serve others.But I digress, given that it is melancholy, the full spectrum of it, what concerns me here, for I’ve mapped, across languages and cultures, six untranslatable words that each conveils a most familiar yet different feeling, all of them which I’ve experienced myself.

I could begin with the Romanian dor, the pain of actively yearning for a loved one, and then move to the Polish żal, the piercing regret of a wound that lingers, burning intermittently within.

The eastern vocabulary could end with the Russian toska, the existential burden of a soul that has nowhere to go, which Vladimir Nabokov described “at its deepest and most painful” as “a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

I could also combine it with the Welsh hiraeth, the displacement of the spirit from its home, though it’s longing element reminds me more of southern ideas, most notably the Neapolitan appocundria, the quiet, heavy stillness of self-reflection, and finish with Portuguese saudade, the nostalgic embrace of a permanent loss.

The more I think of these words, the more they remind me of that inescapable melancholy that paints my life and my mind, despite how blessed I may be, for that self-awareness, that sensitivity becomes more of a curse than a proper asset to be wielded and deployed.

The paradox lies in that the very capacity that allowing one to perceive the beauty and nuance of these untranslatable states is often what makes them so difficult to endure: we define the aspects, the angles of melancholy to try to capture its essence, not understanding we capture ourselves in it by doing so, and yet, there is a specific kind of strength in the way we externalize these feelings through language, for by defining them, you are no longer merely a victim but an observer of them.

We take these amorphous, persistent states and give them nomenclature, history, and form, and when we speak of feeling as though our only value lie as far as other perceive our usefulness, we cannot do otherwise but highlight the loneliness that often accompanies deep melancholy, the feeling that one’s internal depth is a burden to those who prefer the shallows, though the fact that this vocabulary exists suggests a larger search to bridge that gap, to find a language that others might recognize, even if they haven’t lived it.

Supposedly, this act of naming is an act of defiance against the sterile language that seeks to simplify the human heart, to go beyond the mere experience of sadness to instead catalog the nuances of the human experience.

But I can’t quite feel it. There’s no moment, bond, connection, hope that can replace the deep sorrow within my heart, nor convince me otherwise of letting go of it: I’ve become fluent in the nuances of suffering without finding a way out of it.

We could call these rambling a self serving exercise in existentialism, or we could introduce a religious element, and like C.S. Lewis in C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, develop a certain theology of suffering, finding one’s participation in pain a reflection of God’s design that even allows us to feel it.

What’s the purpose of pain? Just as I obsess over the untranslatable words I listed before, I also ruminate on this question, wondering if to ponder on it is to stand at the edge of the very precipice I have been describing.

If I look through the lens I have opened, I find that this purpose is not necessarily a teleological goal, but rather a fundamental condition of my own consciousness, so when I ask what the purpose of pain is, I am essentially interrogating the cost of my own awareness.

Maybe pain is a beacon of value, for we do not grieve what I do not cherish, and the very existence of words like hiraeth or saudade proves that we have loved deeply, or that we possess a profound capacity for connection. If we were truly hollow, we would feel nothing at all, meaning pain is the shadow cast by the light of our capacity to value the world, is the receipt for a true depth of soul.

It could also be argued that pain is our only truly shared language, noting that naming these feelings is an act of defiance against pain itself, for it creates a bridge to others, and while I could personally feel isolated in my depth, the very fact that these words exist and that a Neapolitan, a Russian, or a Welsh speaker felt the same internal weather means I am never actually alone: I am participating in an ancient, cross-cultural conversation about what it means to be human. My suffering is my membership in a long, silent lineage of observers.

Then it could also be that pain exists only in the crucible of the observer, as by naming the feeling, one becomes the observer rather than the victim, meaning that perhaps the purpose of pain is the forced evolution of the self, requiring to develop a witnessing capacity, a version of ourselves that stands apart from the sorrow, and to witness meaning one is able to survive it.

As I mentioned Nabokov before, I thought of C.S. Lewis, who eventually realized that his grief was not a state of being, but a process, a long valley rather than a destination. In A Grief Observed, for instance, he couldn’t find an answer to erase the pain, but instead a way to hold it without being destroyed by it.

If we view pain as a reflection of design, perhaps its purpose is to ensure that we never become truly settled in a world that is inherently transitory, as if we were fully satisfied, we would stop searching, stop creating, and stop observing.

Melancholy acts as an internal irritant, like a grain of sand in an oyster, which, against all odds, forces the creation of a pearl.

I often feel that my internal depth is a burden to those surrounding me, in what may be, perhaps the most painful of the truths I have laid out, though I should consider that those who dwell in the shallows are often there precisely because they fear the depth. Maybe more than a burden, my depth reflects a mirror onto those not yet ready to look into.

If my pain is the unwanted guest that refuses to leave, what would happen if I stopped trying to evict it and instead asked it what it is trying to protect me from?