He couldn’t point to anything. His parents were loving and present. There was no trauma he could name. He had a safe home, enough food, parents who showed up.
But in therapy at thirty-eight he kept circling the same territory. A feeling he’d had as a child of not being quite seen. Not abused. Not neglected. Just slightly beside the point in his own family.
He felt guilty even saying it. He knew people who had it so much worse.
There is a specific difficulty in the wound that has no clear cause. When something was genuinely terrible, at least the story is legible. But when everything was mostly fine, and yet something still aches, the work is harder. Because you don’t get to name a villain. You don’t get to say: this is the thing that happened. You only have: something in me was not quite met, and I’m still looking for it.
I know this kind of grief. The grief that comes with a side of guilt for having it. The internal negotiation of telling your story and then immediately auditing it against people who had it harder.
He had a good childhood. He is still, somehow, working through it.
Both things are allowed to be true.
What was the thing he needed that he didn’t know how to ask for, and that nobody knew he wasn’t getting?
Being mostly seen is its own kind of loneliness. Not abandoned. Not abused. Just carrying the quiet feeling that the people who loved you didn’t quite know you. That there was a version of you they were proud of and a version of you they never really met.
He keeps going to therapy. He keeps trying to find language for something that happened very slowly and left no marks.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Have you ever felt like something was missing even when nothing was obviously wrong?
- Is there a part of yourself that the people closest to you don’t fully know?
- What would it mean to grieve something that doesn’t have a clear name?
Something similar runs through She Forgave Her Father. She’s Still Not Sure What That Means., if you want to keep sitting with it.
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.