Category : Articles

Sub Category : Relationships

Unfulfilled & The Void Inside Us
As Always, I’m going to be very candid and very honest.  This, as usual, is very personal to me but I don’t mind sharing it at all.  My only hope is that it doesn’t come across as too forcefully weepy or needlessly sorrowful.  This isn’t a self-pity piece of writing.  This is therapy for me.  I would describe this as a journal entry that I share with everything.  I tend not to hold a lot of secrets.  I’m very open and I wouldn’t live any other way.  I think I’m so used to self-expression at this stage, I can never go back.  Some people are aware of their defences and some people are not.  We all have walls we put up.  Usually these psychological walls are erected to protect the ego, to protect one from emotional pain, distress and anxiety.  Each day I make it my mission to become always aware of what I’m thinking and feeling at any given moment.  For your information, most of the time I’m in neutral.  Nothing really phases me, unless something external catches my feelings, for the better or worse.  It is in thinking about this external circumstance that I can create internal happiness, turmoil, anxiety or profound sadness.
What I share with you, might resonate with a part of you or all of you.  Personally, I think the adage of thinking too much and feeling too little is so true.  I wish that one man could see that his anger and rage outbursts are more due to feelings of hurt, betrayal, loss or sadness.  It is in addressing this deep sadness that the man can dissipate feelings of near-constant anger.  Crying is very soothing, in a way.  Not only is it soothing but it is very cleansing.  Women have this one totally right.  Women have a much greater awareness of their emotions than a man does, in general.  Women hold a beauty in expressing their grief through tears.  I find men tend to repress and repress again and again.  Repression of painful thoughts and emotions WILL lead to an anger issue.
I’m slightly digressing here.  This article is more about the void in nearly every person, of adult age.  This void is felt, for me, as a sense of unease.  It’s a very subtle feeling that something feels wrong, all the time.  It is a feeling of being out-of-sync with yourself and the world.  Almost as if you’re there in body but the soul has a touch of sadness to it.  A smile that you express may not internally feel like a smile, but something forced. 
I strongly think of this void in relation to loss and feelings of grief.  This feeling of sadness is deep, and it is profound.  It may follow you around all the time or show up sporadically.  When I was very young I was separated from my real mother, as I went into foster care.  My real mother, Hazel, has since passed on, sadly.  The only woman a little boy knows well, is his mother.  It sounds like a strange thing to hear, if you’ve never felt it, but I miss her.  I only met her twice, and the meeting was brief.  I never felt like I got to know her at all. I will never get to know her now.  Don’t make any mistake here, the bond a little boy has with his mother is very deep.  The only person I knew as ‘mom’, was my foster mother.  That was the only comfort I knew of.  Even being in her presence now has a calming effect on me and I am twenty-six years old.  This is the same with little girls and their Daddies.  Her father is the only man your little girl will know, for a while.  Like a little boy looks up to his mother, a little girl idolizes her daddy.  Trust me, if your child ever says he/she hates you, they don’t.  Unless you’re an abusive parent, your child doesn’t hate you.  They may be let-down or disappointed by you, but they do not hate you.
That first sense of loss came with the death of my real mother in 2006.  Maybe my soul felt grief when I was small, taken from her.  My mother, I have been told, could not care for me.  She had too many psychological issues.  I was told she loved me, but I’ll never really know. The second sense of loss I felt was the death of my foster dad, who I knew as dad for the longest time.  Cancer took him away far too soon.  He was only fifty-two years of age when he died.  I wish he was still around now.  Sometimes I feel like I need a male mentor or role model to look up to.  A large part of me lost myself when he died.  As people around me started passing away, this blanket of being alone covered me from head to toe.  I still feel lonely, to this day.  I feel lonely for a woman I hardly knew and a father I was only starting to know, as he died when I was fourteen years of age.  This is a CRUCIAL time in a boy’s life.  He is taking his first steps that will one day decide his fate as a man in this world.
When parents pass away too soon, it changes you.  Your world may never be the same again.  Even through the traumas, you can move on, but a sadness still clings to your heels.  This sadness I feel will express itself through tears every now and again.  I might find myself crying twice or three times a month.  I do feel a lot better after it.  I feel the weight of despair being lifted off me.
The third loss came at the hands of an ex-girlfriend.  This girl saved me at a time where I was drifting away and needed someone, anyone, to reel me back in.  That girl was my hero.  Even though we haven’t spoken in a fair while now, I still think about her every now and again.  She deserves a space in my heart and she will not be forgotten easily.  I expressed every emotion I had while I was with her.  I laughed harder than I had in a long time, while I was with her.  We laughed a lot together.  As somewhat of a broken soul, she was one of the few to profoundly understand me.  I think a lot of us are more broken than we think.  When I look back at old photos of myself, I think of what lay ahead for me and our little family.  I looked so happy and innocent in these photos, like I was supposed to.  I don’t know if I feel that I’ve lost my innocence and the world doesn’t seem so innocent anymore, like it did.
It's sad to say that I have abandonment issues, but I do.  This could be from feeling ‘abandoned’ by my real mother or ‘abandoned’ by my foster father when he died.  It’s not my fault that these people died but I never got to tell them how much I loved them and hoped they’d be around for a long time.  Life had different plans for me.  I feel happiest when I’m in nature, with animals, in the company of my foster mother and when I’m in a relationship with a woman I really value and really like.  I feel unfulfilled lately.  I feel this gap in my spirit.  Something should be filling it but it’s missing.  Like something is being left out.  I don’t know whether it’s love or a fulfilling career, but something feels like it’s missing.  To give love & get love is beautiful.  We humans are meant to be like this.  We can bond together through our tragedy, yet it’s so difficult to get to know someone so close.  Not everyone is willing to bear their soul to other people.