xenora
- Goutham Yegappan
- Aug 23
- 3 min read
Xenora (noun)
zen-OR-uh
A sense of estrangement or detachment that arises when reflecting on past memories, as if those moments were experienced entirely by someone else.
When I reflect on my life so far—firstly, it hasn’t been that long even though I know my family views me as a tender old man, far too grown to ever get married—I can’t help but split it into chapters that strictly revolve around 2020, the start of the Covid pandemic. Those few years gave way to a period of our lives where we collectively had to instantaneously change the ways we navigated the world. We normalized sitting down in front of our computers on Zoom for hours, as we watched the world hold its breath, distracting ourselves with TikTok dances as scientists worked relentlessly to come up with a vaccine. Death and isolation became centerfold for millions of children who were previously extensively shielded from confronting the reality of our mortality. But in hindsight, even as we wiped our grocery bags down for the fiftieth time, barely able to smell and breathe, it wasn’t our physical bodies that would carry the remnants of the pandemic forward. It was our minds.
Having to change the ways that we worked, connected, loved, and lived at the speed that we were asked to, we caused our minds to temporarily split in order to create space for the new world that was emerging. This psychological process, while it allowed us to adjust and adapt quickly, segmented our lives into sparsely-connected chapters. This splitting is a common response to trauma, where the separation helps the individual delay the processing of difficult-to-accept experiences.
But when these splits aren’t properly integrated into the self at a later stage, the individual begins to lose connection with their past self. In my mind the Goutham that spent time teaching in the Himalayas, walking on the edge of the winding road, scared that he would fall off, the Goutham that lived in Thailand, exploring the red-light district with simultaneous awe and fear rippling through his body, with a friend he made at a hostel in Nagoya, and the Goutham who is currently at a bachelor party in Montreal with some highly functional degenerates, have never met each other. Each environment I’m thrown into creates yet another split, infinitely delaying the integration I yearn for.
But something that has given me peace, is how common I’ve found this phenomenon to be in people. But why is it so? In the past, the rate in which the world changed was significantly slower. A major social, political, or technological revolution occurred only once or twice in a lifetime. If we take a look at the last three decades, however, we’ve all lived through the rise of the Internet, the introduction of smartphones, social media, and now the implementation of artificial intelligence into our daily lives. Simultaneously we’ve seen the profound ramifications of climate change, intense global political conflict, and the deterioration of American politics (for those who live in this country). These changes cannot be undermined, as it has now become ubiquitous for individuals to create splits at the turn of every single one of these events that rapidly change the quality and status of their lives. While some people have the capacity and resources to take time and integrate this rapidly changing world into their identity, many do not. Therefore, addressing the implications of these unintegrated narratives is absolutely vital now.
For those of us with these split identities, reflecting on our past can cause extreme feelings of confusion, isolation, estrangement, and delusion. Our memories, even when they are vivid in its detailing, can still feel as if they belong to someone else entirely. As if it was never really us who experienced them. Though I can list the things I’ve done over these past few years, it often just feels like I’m apathetically recounting a movie I had just recently watched about someone who looks vaguely familiar to me. Every time someone asks me to describe emotionally what an experience was like, I struggle to no avail to find the words because I never experienced those things. It wasn’t me.
These memories, though I hold them so dearly as my only evidence of my existence, feel so distant emotionally. It is the experience of these memories I call xenora.
Examples
The old photographs stirred a deep xenora. I recognized the faces, but the life in them felt distant and foreign.
She spoke of her past with a tone of xenora, detached from the joy and pain those years once carried.
After the accident, even his happiest moments carried a tint of xenora, no longer truly his own.
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