People talk about feeling off kilter, but does anyone ever feel on kilter, or just plain kilter? Originally, kilter was a well-known word on its own terms. To be kilter was to feel in good order, to feel right in the world. Nowadays, nobody refers to the emotion of kilter as a positive state of being. Instead we talk about the experience of being without kilter.
Being off kilter is all about a sense of warped direction. Off kilter is in the same subjective neighborhood as feeling messed up, but describing a different kind of wrongness. To feel messed up is to feel as if the very structure of one’s being is malfunctioning in some way. When one feels off kilter, however, it’s like living on a tilt that’s different from the alignment from the rest of the world, resulting in a feeling of all-pervading peculiarity. It’s similar in some ways to feeling discombobulated, but when things are off kilter, instead of the elements of reality being bent every which way, it’s as if all of reality has changed its angle to diverge from its ordinary polarity.
Imagine what it would feel like to be the Leaning Tower of Pisa, if a tower could experience emotions. That’s what it’s like to feel off kilter, in a metaphorical sense. No actual physical imbalance is required.
If they grant themselves a moment for philosophical reflection, people who feel off kilter may ask whether they themselves are out of alignment, or the rest of the world has begun to tilt precariously to the side. Ultimately, proper alignment is a relative quality, but there is a kind of social gravity that sets a sense of normality according to what most people seem to feel.
Of course, when we feel off kilter, we presume that nobody else feels the way that we do, that everyone else is aligned with the world around them. What if it’s not that way, though? What if most people spend most of their time feeling off kilter, but try to hide their emotional imbalance out of a sense of shame and isolation?
