A Word for the Ache That Never Had a Name

Elare: A Lexicon of the Heart's Unmet Desires

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There’s a beautiful book on my shelf called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. If you haven’t read it, imagine a lexicon written not to define what is, but to name what feels. It’s a collection of invented words for the emotional states we know intimately but have never been able to speak aloud.

His most well-known word is sonder: the sudden realization that everyone around you is living a life as rich and complex as your own. A term for the shimmer of perspective that comes when we remember that each passerby is not background, but main character in their own story.

It’s a beautiful concept. And in a future post, I’ll explore it more deeply—especially the idea of self-sonder, a kind of inverted wonder at the complexity of our own inner lives.

But before we go there, I wanted to offer something of my own.

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Over the past year, I’ve been swimming in memory.

When my mother was dying, I found myself drifting not just into the past, but into a past that never was. I began to feel a strange, quiet yearning—not for the years we did share, but for the ones we could have. I longed for a different version of her, of us. A childhood where she wasn’t overwhelmed. Where I was held in a particular kind of attunement that simply wasn’t available to her at the time.

But what was strange—and strangely beautiful—was that this longing didn’t feel like a betrayal of the truth. It didn’t feel like denial. It felt like something was trying to become whole.

It happened again recently, as I’ve been reconnecting with my father. We’re in a season now of trying to build something authentic in the dusk hours of our relationship. And again, this ache arrived—the longing that he had been different, that I had been differently fathered. And yet, in allowing that longing to rise instead of resisting it, I felt more peace than I expected. As if naming the ache gave it permission to soften into acceptance.

I didn’t have a word for this feeling. Not quite grief. Not fantasy.

Not nostalgia, because it was for something that never happened.

So, like Koenig, I made one up.

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Elare (eh-LAHR-eh)

noun

A tender, aching longing for the childhood you never had.

The parent who never quite showed up the way you needed.

A nostalgia for a love that existed only in possibility,

yet shaped you all the same.

Elare is the soul reaching toward something that never existed—and finding, in that reaching, some strange kind of redemption.

Not because the past is rewritten, but because something quiet and sacred gets rewritten in us.

I don’t know if this is spiritual self-gaslighting or a poetic reconstruction of meaning at the end of a long road. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe it's just what the heart does when it finally has enough room to feel.

I wanted to offer this word to you today—not as a thesis or a frame, but as a hand extended across time. If elare has ever stirred in you, you're not alone.

Later, we can step into sonder and this idea of self-sonder.

But I think this word had to come first.

Because sometimes the thing we need most isn’t insight.

It’s a name.

Thank you for being here.