Holes and holes

There are holes in your heart and then there are holes in your heart.  Every breathing person struggles with the meaning and purpose of life in general and theirs in particular, that's what it is to be human and it is perfectly natural and normal, especially in your young life or after some great tragedy or life event, that hole is perfectly normal as is the struggle therewith.  But there is a subset of humanity that has a hole of another sort in its heart and they probably don't have any idea that it is there.  Just to survive they've rationalized it away, covered it up, ignored it, lied to themselves, and pretend that everything is okay.  But it isn't.  Everyone agrees that physical and sexual abuse are traumatic and horrible, we are even seeing emotional abuse gain footing as a legitimate tragedy, but there is something even more insidious and far harder to detect, acknowledge, and recognize: emotional neglect, but the adverse results on the lives of those affected are harrowing, but so subtle that its victims consider it normal.

I've had well meaning people tell me that 'at least you were clothed and fed,' and I'd like to reply that I would gladly have gone hungry occasionally if only I knew that I was loved and valued; do people say things like that of prison inmates or animals in a shelter?  I'd rather have been housed and fed by some cold and impersonal government agency than have lived with my biological family in the same sort of environment and twisted myself into knots trying to determine what was so horrid about me that I couldn't be loved, at least then I could blame the cold inefficiency of bureaucracy rather than trying to destroy myself to pardon my parents, for no child ever questions her mother's perfections, rather she will hate and blame herself for her mother's failings rather than admit some parental defect.  The results are hideous, but hidden under a veneer of fake normality.  Ripping off that false scar is the only way to heal, the process is long and painful, but far less miserable than living a lie.  Only then can you start to wrestle with the normal holes in the human heart.  To learn more, start here.