Comphoria and Achronia: Naming the Joy and the Sorrow

 

Hi, welcome to another one of my essay-ramblings about my life, reflecting on bits and bobs.  What I want to talk about today is two concepts that I have felt a lot, and when I’ve mentioned it to friends, they’ve expressed great solidarity with my words.

As a trans person, there are moments that leave me at a loss for words. Moments so specific and so visceral they deserve to be named.  However, the vocabulary we use is quite difficult to change.  Sure, we’ve had recent additions to the common lexicon – brainrot, transmisogyny, and compersion are the examples that spring to mind, but for the most part it takes a while for these to filter through.

Lacking a proper name for a lot of these feelings, I’ve decided that where a word doesn’t exist, you can just invent them – a kind of linguistic liberalism.

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Comphoria

The first of these concepts is a kind of joy I’ve felt many times: when I witness someone, especially another trans person, finally start to become.  Honestly, I’ve seen it most recently when I was at the pub with a few friends, including one friend who’d travelled down from Scotland.  Seeing her with her now boyfriend, laughing with joy and seeing her face just light up…  It was a beautiful thing to see, existing authentically as a woman loved by a boyfriend who sees her for exactly who she is.  It is the way a trans person’s whole face changes as they figure out who they are, realising that this is the way it was always meant to be, the way they light up just from being allowed to exist more authentically, the way you can see them inhabit themselves for the first time.

It’s not just happiness, not just pride. It’s joy because they’re joyful. It’s the kind of vicarious euphoria you can only feel when you know, deeply, how hard it is to get there.

There isn’t a word for it, so I made one: comphoria.

I figured it out as a portmanteau of two words:

  • Compersion – a term originating in the polyamorous community that refers to a joy felt when seeing your partner happy with another partner.
  • Euphoria - a feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness.  In the trans community, gender euphoria refers to the joy one feels when experiencing true authenticity.

So a more formal definition then:

comphoria (n.): the warm, affirming joy you feel when witnessing another person — especially another trans person — discover, embrace, and express their authentic self over time.

It names that moment when you watch someone bloom.

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Achronia

But there’s another feeling, too.  A darker one.

My other feeling is that there isn't a clear word for the concept of being sorrowful that someone else hasn't been able to realise their full potential. In a trans context, its like seeing someone you who has told you they're trans but utterly fail to actualise - and it hurts so much because you know the joy they could be feeling but they won't reach out and grasp it. But equally outside of a trans context, its like meeting up with a school friend who was exceptionally bright when you were with them, when they were at school, but since then they've ended up labouring or flipping burgers when they could have been a doctor.   I am not trying to throw shade at people who do basic but honourable professions, and as such, I don't think disappointment or grief is properly appropriate. There just isn't a word for "nostalgia for a future that could have existed". 

The webnovel Sisters of Dorley by Alyson Greaves has a line that sums it up perfectly:

“Give a trans woman an inch, and she’ll take 10 years from herself.”

I’ve felt that ache over and over — with friends who told me they were trans and then locked themselves back in the closet; with old classmates who were so brilliant and bright but settled for lives that diminished them; with people who couldn’t see how much more was possible for them.  This doesn’t really expand to those who tried and failed, its mostly for folks who never dared to try, who were too scared or too willing to sit in comfortable misery.

We don’t have a word for that feeling, either.

So I made one: achronia.

achronia (n.): a tender, poignant sorrow for the unrealised future of another — the ache of seeing someone deny themselves what one perceived as their full potential and mourning what they could have become.

The existential horror of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is, at its heart, a meditation on achronia. The film lingers unflinchingly on the quiet devastation of unfulfilled potential — a life spent circling authenticity without ever quite grasping it. Its characters are haunted not by monsters, but by the futures they might have lived, if only they’d dared to step fully into themselves. The sorrow the film evokes isn’t rooted in what’s been done, but in what’s been left undone.

Watching it in a cinema in Epsom, I felt the word achronia crystallise for me: that specific, tender ache of watching someone waste away in “comfortable misery,” shrinking to fit the smallest version of themselves. That feeling was only deepened by the faces of the other people in the theatre — particularly one man, who looked to be in his early thirties, wearing a quiet expression of oh god, what am I doing with my life? I don’t know if he was having a trans realisation in that moment, but I hope he’s doing okay now.

In many ways, TV Glow feels like a cinematic embodiment of achronia.

It’s not quite grief, because nothing tangible was lost.
It’s not quite disappointment, because it comes from love, not judgment.
It’s nostalgia for a future that could have been.

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These two words feel like two sides of the same coin:

·        Comphoria, for the joy of witnessing someone’s becoming.

·        Achronia, for the sorrow of witnessing someone’s not-becoming.

They’re both part of loving people — of being in community with people who are finding (or hiding from) themselves.  They’re both deeply human feelings, and really, they’re something I wish the English language has.  But that’s the thing about language – it reflects the societal fabric we live in.   We don’t have words in the English language for the deep platonic love one has for their friends.  We don’t have a word that distinguishes between familial love for those who are not blood relatives and those who are forged family.

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These words are probably just the start of me trying to name feelings and come up with concepts to make sense of the way I perceive the world.  If they resonate with you, I’d encourage you to use them in conversation and writings – of course if they already exist or similar exists and I just haven’t found them, let me know too!

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