I can be deeply needed and still feel emotionally homeless

Dear Delyara, Children need me. Work needs me. Life needs me. The house needs me. I matter in all these practical, visible, undeniable ways. And still, some days I can feel like there is nowhere my own emotional life fully lands. That is such a specific loneliness. Not being unwanted. Being useful without being truly held. I think a lot of women live there. Their lives are full enough to cancel the word “lonely” in other people’s minds, but internally they feel like there is no place where they can fully exhale as themselves without first becoming useful or understandable. That kind of homelessness inside a full life is hard to name. It is also real.