Discombobulated.
It’s one of my favourite words. It also describes how I’ve been feeling on and off a lot recently.
I spent some time writing about it as a word and as a state of being in my newsletter. Occasionally, the more personal or looser pieces I write for my sunday mail out spark something a little deeper, and this was one of those pieces. So I wanted to expand upon it a bit and share it in a more permanent place.
Originally it was just a playful, rootless coinage conveying a sense of confusion. It was probably inspired by similar words like discomfit and discompose, but the –bobulate part has no etymological origin. In fact, it started its linguistic life as discombobricate, a bit of American English, which mocked its latin sounding brothers. It is this nonsense quality that gives the word its meaning—i.e., to throw into a state of confusion. It’s also what makes it the perfect word for when I’m feeling without my bearings, because it has no root, no anchor in the ‘real world’ of language.
I’m never quite sure why, but I can quite easily feel anchorless. Perhaps it’s because I had a change to my routine on a Monday, perhaps it’s a change in the chemicals that control my feelings or perhaps it’s just where my mind is at.
Erynn Brook recently put together a brilliant Twitter thread about mental health and executive function. She described exectuive function by way of a clever post-it note metaphor:
Generally, I have a pretty good stack of post-it notes. But when I’m feeling discombobulated, it’s not that I have fewer post-it notes necessarily, it’s that the stack has been dispersed by a huge gust of wind and I’d left grasping at the air to get them back.
That’s probably one of the reasons I’m a very routine and order based person. If I can weigh my post-its down with the rock of a solid plan or stick them together with a set of routines, the less likely I feel like they are to blow away.
I think, or at least I hope, it’s a feeling a lot of us have at some points or other. Like we’ve been spun around a few times too many in the playground and we’ve lost sight of the ground and need to sit down before we can get on with our days. Or, not to become that guy, like in Fight Club when the narrator says “Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.”
It’s a normal feeling, but it is a little discombobulating.
If you’ve been made dizzy recently, or in case someone takes you on the merry go round any time soon here are a few of the ways I find the ground again when I’m feeling that way.
Take some time to sit down – it’s easy to feel like you’re loosing ground if you stop just because you’re feeling a bit off. But I’ve found, at least for me, the more I try to push myself forward the more discombobulated I feel if I can get back on track. So, I like to sit down with a book or a film or just to close my eyes.
Find what grounds you – there are some things which are just so rooted in our brains that they put us back in our bodies. That might be visiting a specific place, cooking a certain food (smells are some of the strongest memory triggers) or revisiting an old favourite. For me, it’s speaking to my Mum. It doesn’t matter what we talk about, this week it was the carpet she’s just had fitted, but I can’t be anything but myself when I’m speaking to her.
Return to a thing you can do without too much effort – in Erynn’s thread she point out how just telling someone who’s running low on post-it notes to go to yoga doesn’t help because it takes a whole load of post-it notes to actually get to yoga. “It’s not that “you should try yoga” is a bad idea, but it’s the equivalent of telling someone standing in the ashes of their burned down house that some succulents would really brighten things up.” Instead someone helping you make a plan is better. So if you can let someone else take the work out of your plans for a little while so that you can reorder your post-its. Or, if you’re on your own, just go for something that’s so well-worn that you could do it in your sleep – make a lasagna, do some cross-stitch, watch some trashy TV.
Try a shock to the system* – if all else fails try to step out of your routine again. Routines are brilliant but it’s easy to go through them on auto-pilot, which means if you’re discombobulated it can be as if you’re floating above yourself in some kind of out of body experience while you go about your day to day. Doing something unexpected, even if it’s something small, can shake you back to reality. I’m going to try a photography trip to a new spot after this newsletter goes out. *This one only really works if you’ve got the mental energy and resources, so I know it won’t apply to everyone in every situation.
That’s what I’ve got some etymology, some tips, some being a messy human being in the world.
