Making up for pain unfelt.

When my father left, I didn't grieve at all. I was so young that I didn't even understand the fact that the person who, I presume, I loved was gone forever. I never asked what happened or cried. I didn't seem to even notice.

Life got worse after that, that I remember well. Strangers posing as parents, abuse, a settling sense of being lost, unloved, unwanted, and unworthy to be kept. Scared of attention and terrified of being unseen at the same time. No one explained to the child me what divorce meant. No one bothered to tell me that I wasn't the reason that man was no longer around. Maybe they thought if I didn't ask - there was no need to?

I don't remember what I decided then. Maybe I reasoned, with my kindergartner brain, that I was the reason he was gone. Terrified to ask, I planted that fear and it grew like a thick wall of thorny vines around me. Don't be too much, don't make a fuss, just be a good girl and work hard to be kept. Love costs a lot, but for you - it costs everything, including yourself. Be everything they want you to be:it's the only way!

I'm older now than my father was before he left without a goodbye, and older still before he died. He never knew what his choices cost the little girl he left behind for a bottle of booze. And I spent my life working so hard to be the bestest little girl in the world. Exceptional, amazing, strong, impeccable, unforgettable...those are the qualities required to be loved, are they not?

Except they're not. The people keep coming and going, plucking the best off my tree and departing with a careless wave. And trying harder to be the best just made each goodbye more devastating. And now, grieving the biggest disappointment and loss of my life, falling apart, losing myself again and again, I'm realizing that maybe this isn't just romantic heartbreak.

Maybe this grief is all-consuming because I'm making up for the pain I never knew how to express as a child. She couldn't process it at 4-5 years old, so she put it into a box, locked the door behind it, and let it grow.

It's not just a breakup. It became an outlet for every fear, hurt, abandonment, uncertainty, and feeling of being betrayed that a young child can't understand. I don't know how to carry it for both of us, to be quite honest. I don't know if I'm even right. It's not your fault that's what life dealt me, and it's not even my father's fault - he was stuck in his own circle of hell. And now I feel like I'm finally seeing the hell around me that I called home. Grieving for two or maybe infinite versions of myself who lost so many dreams on the way here.

I'll sit with this.