I can spend a whole day speaking and still feel unseen in the one place it matters

Dear Delyara, I answer people all day. Children, work, family, the school, messages, polite conversations, useful conversations, practical conversations, all the little ordinary exchanges that make a life look connected from the outside. And still, by night, I can feel this terrible untouched place in me that has not been reached by any of it. That’s what loneliness means to me now. Not absence. Inaccuracy. People interact with me. They don’t always meet me. And because I am so good at functioning, they often don’t even know how much of me stayed outside the room while I was speaking to them. I don’t know how to ask for a deeper kind of recognition without sounding needy. That fear keeps me lonelier too.