Permanent Voids

Unfortunately, healing often comes with realizations that hold deep grief. There is deep validation that comes in connecting the dots between our wounds and our current realities and experiences, but sometimes the injustice of the truths of those same connections are heavier than we can bear. I call these permanent voids: a loss where the healing does not come from being righted or fixed, but simply by being given space to be acknowledged, validated, and felt. From being given permission to accept that many of our shortcomings as adults stem from unchosen realities of our childhoods.

And let me tell you: even the most privileged of childhoods hold loss. Because perfection is not a thing, not one person is immune to knowing loss in some form or another.

What do we do when a need that is supposed to be met in childhood in order to enter into adulthood is never, in fact, met in childhood? Are we supposed to continue through life - into love, into our careers, into parenthood - still? We are expected to, it seems. And not only are we expected to, we ourselves desire to live. We desire to know and be known, to love and be loved, to aspire and achieve, to bring humans up to do the same and partake in the joy and pride that we had something to do with furthering another generation after us.

All while holding voids that have yet to be healed and nurtured in ways that will enable us to do so in edifying ways - both for us and those we surround.

So then what?

It would seem highly inappropriate and unhealthy as an adult to express a childlike need.

And yet. We are culturally expected to grow and flourish as a human who has had their needs fully tended to, while grieving the reality that they did not, in fact, get tended to at all.

What deep, incredible, excruciating grief.

Different, but equivalent in magnitude to the type of grief we experience in the death of a loved one. Because it is death, in a way. It is the death of a dream, an expectation, a right as a human, when we lose, or in some situations, never receive, something as a child and carry that loss into adulthood. It is a curse of time - there are many gifts of time, to be sure - but this one is a deep loss: that of a permanent void. It is the type of grief you can do nothing to ease except sit with it, to feel it fully, until time does its work to ease the excruciating loss enough for us to move slowly forward and continue to live. And even here, though we can and will keep living, though we’ve proven over and over through each loss up to this point in our lives that we will come out the other side, the ache never fully goes away.

This is being human.

There is good. There is hard. There is everything in between.

The antidote, then?

Maybe it’s simply acceptance. Maybe it’s leaning into the comforting reality that we are not alone in it all. Because even though each of our stories and experiences are different, the human experience is always happening within the same human emotions we all share.

Deep joy, and deep grief.

Deep gratitude, and deep loss.

We learn that the antidote is not ridding ourselves of the grief and the loss, but learning to hold the tension of experiencing the joy and gratitude in life while also carrying with us the grief and loss that also make us who we are - and having the patience and forbearance to accept those hard parts in each other’s stories, too.

Maybe it’s being brave enough to show up, to feel it all, and to hold each other up along the beautifully painful journey of it all.