There was a space inside me that I could never quite describe. I lived around it, avoided it, adapted to it. It was never loud, never dramatic — just this constant hum of absence. A void. A weightless heaviness. I didn’t have a name for it for most of my life. I just assumed this was what it meant to be human — to always feel slightly out of sync, slightly off-center, slightly... not here.

But I’ve named it now. The black hole.

And with that naming, something cracked open. Not in a clean or cathartic way. Not like a movie scene where clarity arrives like a sudden sunrise. No — it was more like a tremor beneath the surface of everything I thought was solid. A silent shift. An uncoiling. The beginning of something terrifying and important.

The black hole is what formed when my needs were met with silence. When my feelings were too big for the room I was in. When I learned to anticipate everyone else’s reactions before I was even old enough to spell the word “boundaries.” It’s the result of growing up in a house where survival meant smiling when I wanted to scream. Where “I’m fine” wasn’t just a phrase — it was a way of life.

Naming it didn’t solve anything. It didn’t fill the emptiness or stitch together the missing pieces of memory. But it gave me a reference point. A way to stop floating. A way to start asking the questions I’d been too afraid to form.

Since then, I’ve been doing research. Deep, emotional, obsessive research. Not just to understand what happened to me — but to find out if I was the only one. I’ve been reading books about childhood emotional neglect, about complex PTSD, about the long-term effects of being raised in environments where your inner world was never seen, reflected, or encouraged to exist.

And the answer is: I’m not the only one. Not even close.

That should be comforting, right? To know that you’re not alone? That others have walked this path and found words for the things you didn’t think could ever be described? And yes, in some