Sukogita (sū-koh-ji-ta)
I love this word—Sukogita, coined by Sadia Hakim, literally meaning “being stressed out and chill at the same time”—like when you have exams yet still scroll memes on Instagram.
It’s a blend of “Sukoon” (سکون) from Urdu, meaning peace or tranquility, and “Agita” from Italian, meaning restlessness or anxiety. It encapsulates the paradox of feeling both at peace and restless at the same time—a state where you are stressed yet strangely calm, carrying tension but also a quiet acceptance of it.
It is the sensation of standing in the eye of a storm, where the world whirls in chaos around you, but within, there is a peculiar stillness, or the outside world is calm but there is chaos inside your head and heart.
I cannot help but wonder—how often do we exist in this liminal space, neither fully drowning nor truly afloat? The weight of worry pressing against our ribs, yet an odd tranquility resting in the spaces between. A mind that refuses to be still, tangled in the mess of overthinking, yet a heart that has learned to surrender to what is beyond control.
Sukogita is the contradiction of a body exhausted yet a soul unyielding, of nights spent restless in thought but softened by the quiet comfort of knowing that this, too, shall pass. Perhaps it is in this delicate balance—between tension and surrender, between holding on and letting be—that we truly endure.
— Sadia Hakim // Neo-Logophilia