Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.
Interpretation
Abandonment causes deep emotional pain and suffering, similar to a physical injury.
In this quote, Tayari Jones powerfully captures the emotional impact of abandonment by comparing it to physical pain. Instead of a quick, sharp pain that fades, abandonment feels like a profound injury that is both physical and emotional, leaving lasting bruises and a struggle to breathe. This metaphor illustrates how deeply feelings of abandonment can affect one's life and psyche, emphasizing that the pain is often more than just a momentary wound; it can linger and reshape one's existence.
In practice
In a therapy session discussing the long-term effects of abandonment on relationships.
And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
Dating is pressure and tension. What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night?
People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.
Being trans, I've grown up with the understanding that most women are born girls, yet some are born boys. And most men are born boys, yet some are born girls. And if you're ready for this, some people are born girls or boys and choose to identify outside our society's binary system, making them genderqueer.
It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person, creates a bond which nothing seems able to break.
Passive aggressors who are adept at this will have trained themselves to remain calm, while you get irritated and emotional.
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