There’s a sadness beneath the surface I’ve been carrying for most of my life — a quiet, aching truth I’ve only recently been able to name:

I don’t think I’ve ever been truly loved.

Not by my mother.
Not in friendship.
Not in my past relationship.

With my mother, I know I wasn’t loved. Not in the way a child should be. There may have been moments of care to keep up appearances, but I was never emotionally seen, never nurtured, never safe.

With my father, there were glimmers. Maybe even something resembling love at times. But even those were brief and inconsistent — always surrounded by emotional distance, or overshadowed by pain.

And in friendship? I’m not sure. I think I often gave more than I received, hoping that if I poured enough of myself into others, they’d choose to stay. But I don’t know if I was ever really known.

Even my one romantic relationship — the one that I thought was real — feels hollow when I look back. She never asked about my family. Never showed interest in my story, my dreams, my inner world. It was all surface. It hurts to admit, but I don’t think she loved me. Maybe she loved the idea of me. Maybe I loved the idea of being loved.

The truth is, I didn’t know what love looked like — so I couldn’t recognise its absence.
I just accepted what was there. Because I was desperate. And it’s only now, with some distance, that I can see how little I was given.

It’s fucking sad.

It’s the kind of grief that doesn’t have a clear start or end — because you’re not mourning what was, you’re mourning what should have been. What was never there.

But even in that sadness, there’s something else too:

I’m not numb anymore.

I’m not pretending it was fine.
I’m not blaming myself.
I’m finally feeling it.

And that means something is shifting.
I don’t know what comes next. I don’t have a neat resolution.
But I’m here. Feeling it. Naming it.
And maybe — slowly — making space for something real to grow.