This article was automatically translated from the original Turkish version.
Everyone seeks meaning in their experiences.
Because meaning brings comfort. If we know why something happened, we believe we can cope with it. If we are sad, we want to know why; if we are angry, we want to know the cause; if we feel longing, we want to know whom we miss.
But what about feelings with no explanation at all?
These are the most exhausting emotions of all.
Sometimes nothing has happened. Life continues as usual. Your family is well, you have no major problems at work, your phone has not rung, and you have received no bad news. When you sit down and think, you ask yourself: “What is bothering me?”
No answer comes.
But the feeling does not go away.
It feels as if something inside is wrong, as if you are about to receive bad news, as if life is hiding something from you that it has not yet told you...
Humans cannot endure this uncertainty. Because often, uncertainty weighs more than the pain itself.
That is why our minds immediately begin searching for a cause.
“Perhaps it is because of that thing I said yesterday.”
“Is it because he has been cold toward me?”
“Maybe I am not successful enough.”
“Or am I truly not happy?”
We try to attach dozens of unrelated thoughts to this feeling, because nothing is more frightening than being unable to name an emotion.
Perhaps the problem is not the feeling itself.
The problem is our inability to explain it.
Perhaps that is why people seek to name feelings they cannot describe. Because naming something is not always about finding a solution; it is simply about no longer feeling alien to what you feel.
I too searched for a word to describe the vague emptiness that lingers within me.
The word I found is “eksiz”.
Perhaps this is not the right name.
Perhaps years from now someone will give this same feeling a completely different name.
Perhaps no one will ever find a shared name for it.
But whenever I feel that emptiness I cannot explain, I will call it “eksiz”.
Not because it is the true name of the feeling, but because it allows me to recognize it.
Because sometimes what a person needs is not to explain their feeling to the world, but first to explain it to themselves.
Yet I still believe this:
A feeling does not need a name to exist.
We cannot see the wind, but we know it touches our skin.
Silence has no shape, yet sometimes it is the heaviest burden of all.
You cannot see the emptiness left when someone leaves a room, yet that emptiness fills the entire space.
A house can feel deserted even while its inhabitants are still inside.
A city can feel lonely even in the midst of a crowd.
Sometimes you long for your childhood, but what you miss is not a house, a street, or old toys—it is a feeling you know will never return.
Sometimes you return to a place you have not seen in years. Everything is where it was. The street is the same, the trees are the same. The only thing that has changed is you. Inside you, an unnameable absence moves—but nothing has actually been lost.
People are most bewildered when they long for something that is not there.
Because they do not know what they are searching for.
They cannot say what they have lost.
They are not even sure if they have lost anything at all.
Perhaps that is why some feelings have no answer.
They are not meant to be solved—they are meant to be noticed.
Those who wish to do so give a name to their emptiness.
Those who do not simply accept its presence.
In both cases, the one thing that remains unchanged is this: A feeling may have no name.
But that does not mean it does not exist.
Perhaps the most real feelings are those that have never entered a dictionary...
