Recently, I had a very strong, yet puzzling, emotional experience, and I realized that I’ve felt it before. I wish there were some wonderful term for this (perhaps there is, in German or Japanese).
I was reading a description of someone, and it said, “He lives with his wife and children on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.” As I read this line, I had a fleeting, yet complete, vision of what that life would be like—the life of a person living with his family on the Upper East Side.
But in the next moment, I realized, “Wait, that’s my life; I live in that neighborhood myself, with my family!” Yet the reality of my experience doesn’t at all match my vision of what that “life” would be like. And oddly, my imaginary version seems richer and more real, in a way, than my actual experience.
I realized I can provoke this feeling just by putting my own experience into words. If I think, “She went to an all-girl school in the Midwest,” I have an idea of what that was like, but I did go to an all-girl school in the Midwest, and it was very different from what my imagination kicks up.
Maybe “parallax feeling” is a term to describe this.
Have you ever experienced this feeling? It’s hard to describe.
Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.
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