Mubble-Fubbles

a vocab word that you chose for me. Also, ramfeezled.

Hey, are you guys okay? Is there a reason y’all chose the mubble-fubbles, other than that it’s a fun hyphenate to say? To be fair, I actually chose this one too—maybe I’m projecting? 

To reiterate: last week I held a poll, as I am wont to do when a good idea for a word escapes me, and you all voted on which of these three I should write about. This time, you actually voted for just one (instead of a 4-way tie like last time), and it’s a great catalyst for one of my personal essay-esque ramblings, methinks. But it did make me feel a bit of compassion for you guys, or at least some commiseration, as to this vibe.

The definition of mubble-fubbles, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, is just what it says on the tin. Er, in the tweet above, from which I yoinked the image. And it’s a word from the 1500s. So tell me true. Are you all feeling a ‘pervasive sense of melancholy, gloom, and “blah”?’ Doldrums, even? Wanna talk about it? That’s what the comments are for. I’ll go first:

I sure am [feeling the mubble-fubbles], and in my case it’s a constant self-questioning as to whether it’s some flavor of burnout, leftover lockdown brain fog, or just perimenopause. Probably the latter—the more I research perimenopause symptoms, the more I feel like everything that’s between slightly off and truly wretched-feeling is just that. Because it seems to be true, that perimenopause just runs the gamut; from mood swings to back pain to brain fog to memory loss, to nerve strain, to overheating, to dry mouth, to cramping, to hallucinations, to…

Do we have the mubble-fubbles because we’re ramfeezled? That’s the question I’ve got for you—I found a new vocab word! It’s related to the one we voted for, I think, and I just found it the other day so I had to add it here.

I keep finding treasure troves of cool obsolete words that hail from the 16- or 1700s (or 1500s, in the case of mubble-fubbles), and most of them I really wish we’d put back into use. I mean, what’s a more vivid term to describe the fatigue felt from overworkedness: burnout, or ramfeezled? 

I feel like these two words are related: like, we’re ramfeezled and so we’ve got the mubble-fubbles. It’s a logical progression, and I feel I’m hearing this experience from pretty much everyone I know, as well as lots that I don’t. It seems like it’s something that’s extremely widespread since the pandemic especially, don’t you think? I’m definitely noticing it more myself, and certainly hearing about it from other people more, too. Maybe it was a more common state of being than I realized all along, and then the pandemic (especially the lockdown part) brought it to the fore and lifted some of the stigma surrounding talking about feeling this way? Or did more of us literally get to this state because of how life was during that time? And still kind of is? We certainly don’t seem to be able to shake it, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed that things (by ‘things,’ I of course mean: /gestures widely/) haven’t really gotten back to ‘normal,’ have they. In some ways, that’s a good thing—for example, the work from home thing is working great for me. But. It ain’t the way it was in 2019 anymore, that’s for sure. Again, not all a bad thing, but.

I’ve said this before in more than one prior vocab word essay:  I do vehemently think that we’ve all survived a serious trauma, and we’re all in coping mode. We’re all reacting with a PTSD we don’t even know how to reconcile, or what do do next about it. Or how to talk about it.

But then, like I said, that’s what the comments are for.