Exulansis
Also known as: Silent Experience, The Fading of Unshared Memories
Formulated by John Koenig (2009)
Definition
Exulansis is the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because other people cannot relate to it. The word was coined by John Koenig for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project of invented words for emotions that have no name. Faced with blank stares or polite indifference, we stop sharing the trip, the obsession or the hard season that nobody around us has lived. Over time the memory itself tends to fade, because it is no longer put into words or confirmed by anyone else. Exulansis shows how much of what we remember depends on a listener, and how a shortage of shared context quietly silences individual experience.