Offering: July 2025
The unbearability of inexplicability
I’ve been very active on social media this week, and am finding it kind of exhilarating for the first time in years. Social media works best for me when it feels like a playful extension of my writing process, and of all the efforts I’ve made to shift my often fraught relationship with it, it hadn’t occurred to me to just try having fun. Making weird little graphics, writing off the cuff captions, posting multiple times a day…
For other reasons, I’ve been digging into my grief research folder which I lovingly titled THIS WORLD IS THE SEA back in 2023. Omg. There is so much good stuff in there! I also have tons of ocean pictures and videos that could use a good home and a growing folder of coastal Maine field recordings. So I thought it might be cool to make some little collages and reels out of clippings to share as I revisit the papers and chapters and books. Here’s one, on indeterminacy:
This morning, I re-read Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic’s paper on how we make sense of emotions, and the possibility that disorientation is more of a norm than we tend to believe. She notes the psychological and philosophical “assumption that we know what we feel.”
As a person who has often felt like my internal life is surplus the words I've been given to describe it (cue a lifelong insatiable appetite for reading) I appreciated the possibility that indeterminacy and disorientation are not only valid, but normal emotional states. For Munch-Jurisic, understanding emotional life “entails much more ambiguity than dominant theories assume.”
When the paper came out I was grieving a difficult break-up and in somatic therapy for the first time. Said another way, I was deeply uncertain and trying to learn new ways of coping beyond manufacturing sureness with stories.
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