When you think of the word euphoria, what are the first associations that jump to mind?
Maybe you think of a state of giddy happiness, a kind of bliss that shrouds the entirety of self: mind, body, and heart. Maybe you think of the TV show Euphoria, and make a subconscious connection between being on drugs and being euphoric as two similarly altered states. Maybe you’ve heard euphoria used recently as the antonym to ‘dysphoria’, repurposed by the trans/gnc community to describe moments of intense joy in embodiment.
All of these associations make sense, given our current definition of euphoria as “a state of intense happiness and self-confidence.” But the roots of the word carry quite a different connotation.
Euphoria comes from the Greek Eu (meaning well, or good,) and Pherein (meaning “to bear,” or “to carry”), so Euphoros means literally “to bear well.” This becomes Euphoria, the “power of enduring easily.”
There is an underlying current of injury or illness embedded in the word. It is picked up by medical Latin, and in 18th century English is a doctor’s term for “condition of feeling healthy and comfortable (especially while sick).”
So why is a word that for so many centuries was associated with suffering gracefully now a word that describes our most heightened experience of bliss?
There isn’t a linguistic answer to this--as you can probably tell by now, etymologies don’t offer placards explaining themselves, but rather a series of dots along an otherwise mysterious path, ripe for pondering and playful interpretation. So here’s my two cents:
To endure easily is to be in an altered and pleasurable state, because you have thrown off (at least partially), the shackled and lesser forms of finite pleasure and pain.
As Peter Rollins says, “there is the trauma that happens to us, and there is the trauma that is life.” To be alive is to be embodied in a form that has aches and pains, that grows sick, that suffers heartbreak and anxiety and fear. To be alive is also to be forced to accept that there is no escaping these things.
And if we accept that we must accept them, what next? Ideally, we learn to bear them well. It is no coincidence that many ancient traditions and philosophies circle around letting go of our attempt to ‘beat’ what harms or potentially could harm us, but to rather practice equanimity in the face of all states of being. This is a basic tenet of mindfulness and of stoicism (among many others).
If we let our reality be dictated by our current state, we will be in a constant and unstable flux of feelings and thoughts. To endure life easily, then, might be understood as having one foot in the door of our continuous, lived experience, and one foot out. It would mean being present, aware of the contours of our experience, but not blindly tied to them. In this way, the term isn’t so literally medical: we do not bear well the pain of a specific injury, per se, but the broader difficulty of enduring embodied life generally.
As a trans man, the recent use of ‘euphoria’ to describe moments of embodiment is particularly intriguing when I apply this framework. Euphoria seems to work in two directions simultaneously. It’s the bliss of stepping outside of ourselves into an altered state not so precariously tied to the permutations and conniptions of our day to day life, and it is also being used as a moment of intense embodiment. If dysphoria is understood as a deep discomfort with the body due to a lack of identification with it, then euphoria is the opposite: it is waking up to the self as embodied. It is looking in the mirror and seeing, if only for a moment, you, and the light-headed joy that comes with it.
Most words, I think, can be used either as blunt tools of communication, or as gateways into curiosity and delight. If you choose the second path, I have found more often than not that I arrive in a place with opposing meanings. In this opposition there is a second choice: to feel lost or ungrounded in polarity, or to see how fundamentally hopeful the coexistence of opposing yet mutually-reinforcing truths can be.
By thinking about the word euphoria, I arrive here: that as humans, we are given the opportunity to find profound joy both by stepping outside of ourselves, and by stepping into ourselves.
It’s not that the feeling is just handed to us, but still, the opportunity for it is there, both when I am able--if only for a second--to intentionally transcend myself, and in those moments when I run my hand over my now-flat chest and feel a sense of arrival at a home I’d spent my whole life imagining.
Words - Finnegan Shepard www.finneganshepard.com
Photography - Mischa de Stroumillo www.mischadestroumillo.com
Another brilliant dharma talk 🙏🏻😊
Finn. So so beautiful. Bravo. And welcome home.