Skipping the messy bits

Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash

I've been working on and off with The Dictionary of Obscured Sorrows. I started going through the entires and jotting down my own reactions for the words, sometimes little stories came out of that. The more I worked through it, the more I became acutely aware that the desire to catalog and define everything may be fundamentally opposed to what life is. But I completely get this desire (which Brené Brown talks about so eloquently). Just today, I've been thinking about my own desire to fast-forward the messy bits and arrive straight at the wisdom and healing. I know I'll get there, but can't we just skip the tough part? Anyway, Claude (yes, the LLM) and I came up with a word for that.

Protelosis (n.) - from Greek pro (before/premature) + telos (end/completion) + -osis (condition) Pronounced "pro-tel-OH-sis"

The impatient longing to arrive at the healed, wise version of yourself without enduring the transformation - wanting the butterfly while still in the cocoon, the clarity without the confusion, the strength without the breaking.