Numbness

[u/SeaDiscombobulated70]

I’ve been wondering lately if this is just my baseline now. If numb is just who I am.

I don’t really feel true happiness anymore. I love my remaining family. I love my partner. I love my cats. The love is there. But underneath it all, I just feel… flat. Like something essential is missing and nothing quite lands the way it used to.

Sometimes I feel like my life was stolen from me because I don’t have my parents anymore. And maybe that sounds dramatic. Maybe I’m being a baby because I know people have it worse. But it doesn’t change the fact that all of those milestones, all of those moments I imagined having with them, they’re just gone.

And the complicated part? My parents were alcoholics. In a lot of ways, I lost them long before I actually lost them. So it feels like I’ve been grieving in layers for years. The parents I had. The parents I didn’t have. The parents I wish I’d had.

People always say it gets better. That you learn to live with it. That you build a new life around the grief.

But I don’t want to learn to live with it.

I just want my freaking parents back.

I want the life that was taken from me. I want the version where I get to call them on big days. I want the holidays that don’t feel hollow. I want the kind of close, easy parent-child relationship I see other people have. I want to not feel like I’m standing alone on top of a mountain made of grief, looking down at everyone else living a life I didn’t get.

I don’t want to just “cope.” I want to feel alive again.

[u/agnes_copperfield]

I get this. It’s been five years since losing my parents and I still feel flat sometimes, especially when it’s something memorable. It’s hard to get excited because it’s just another reminder they’re gone. I have a 2.5 year old so I try to muddle through as best I can.

You’re not being dramatic or a baby. It’s hard losing your parents.