Separate

How many things are we separate from in life?
Not just people, but parts of ourselves.
Emotions we tuck away because they feel too heavy to carry in public.
Friendships that once felt effortless and now live at arm’s length.
Relationships that exist more in memory than in the present.
Even reality itself can feel divided — the version we move through each day, and the one we quietly long for when the noise finally stops.

Separation isn’t always loud. Often it’s subtle, almost polite. It arrives disguised as independence, strength, coping. We get on with the day. We do what needs to be done. We parent, we work, we organise, we plan. From the outside it can look like wholeness, like capability. Yet underneath, there can be a constant awareness of something missing — a space where togetherness once lived.

How do we survive without that feeling of being with someone?
Not just in theory, not just knowing another adult exists somewhere in the world, but the daily sharing of life. The passing comments. The silent understanding. The shared weight of parenting — the decisions, the worries, the exhaustion — carried by two instead of one. The reassurance that someone else sees what you see, feels what you feel, and stands beside you in it.

There is a particular kind of separation that comes from doing everything alone while still being surrounded by people. Children need you. Life demands you. Responsibility doesn’t pause for grief or adjustment. And so you function. You show up. But togetherness — real togetherness — isn’t just about presence. It’s about being held emotionally, about sharing the unseen parts of the day, the thoughts that don’t make it into conversation.

Perhaps this is why separation feels so disorientating. It isn’t always a clear break; sometimes it’s a slow drift between what life looks like and what it feels like. Between connection and solitude. Between surviving and living.

I don’t know if there are solid questions here.
I’m not sure there are solid answers either.

Just a quiet observation for today — that separation takes many forms, and not all of them are visible. And that learning how to exist within it, without losing ourselves completely, may be one of the hardest things we are ever asked to do.