What helps, at least for me, is making something. Anything, really. Make yourself a proper meal. Make a nice drink and sit with it for a while. Make a note, a mental one or a written one, of what you’re actually feeling underneath the noise. Small acts of care for yourself are not trivial. Think of these as rituals, small and daily, reminding you that you are here, still making something good for yourself.

Make good use of what’s available. Sign up for free online courses. Read local writers or borrow books from the library. Put together playlists filled with YouTube tutorials on something you’ve always been curious about but never had time to prioritise. It doesn’t have to be useful in any grand sense. It just has to be yours.

A playlist can also be a document of where you are. The songs you reach for when you’re processing something are telling you what you need; whether that’s to feel it fully, to move through it, or simply not to be alone in a quiet room with your own thoughts. Music has a way of meeting us where spoken words sometimes can’t.

Write about it. Put grief into words, as delicately as you want. It is not that easy, but give it a try. There’s something particular about writing that other things don’t do that well. It slows thought down enough for you to look at. It makes the formless take shape. Expressive writing, even just a few minutes a day, helps us process difficult experiences, reflect and find meaning in them. Start with whatever is there and it doesn’t have to be polished. Before you know it, something meaningful surfaces, not just for whoever might read it, but for yourself.

The idea isn’t to escape, but to redirect. It’s the simple act of engaging with life, even in small ways, when parts of your world have gone quiet. Time has its value. The hours you could have spent with someone who meant something to you are still yours. They don’t belong to whoever couldn’t meet you where you were. Fill them with something that grows inside out of you.

None of this is groundbreaking advice. I know, and that’s intentional. Filling gaps doesn’t need grand gestures or sweeping realisations. It’s simply what you do in getting through another day. That’s enough. No deeper meaning. No bigger purpose, just something for yourself.

One thing that comes up often during these gaps is that healing isn’t linear, and it rarely looks the way we expect. Some days you’ll feel like you’ve moved forward. Other days you’ll feel exactly where you started. Both are part of healing that comes with growth. The goal isn’t to feel better immediately. The goal is to be present with yourself while you remain patient.

Just make something every day. Something small, something yours. The gaps may stay, but they don’t have to fill your mind all day. Make something worth having on the other side of this gap.

And the gentlest reminder I can offer: you don’t have to have it all figured out. No matter if you’re in the same place, no matter how slowly you move, it’s enough.

What do you make? I'm genuinely curious, drop them in the comments. ♡

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Somewhere in that quieter rhythm, writing offline like I always do, this kept showing up: there are missing parts everywhere. So here it is.

What’s Missing?

People we once thought would show up simply don’t anymore. Such gaps remain, without anyone asking why, as if they were never meant to be touched.

The reasons might be more layered. Some people stay absent out of grief because showing up means feeling the harshness and pain they once received, and they’re not ready for that. Some avoid shame or guilt, carrying a weight they do not know how to put down. And some just don’t want to be judged, so they’d rather show up and perform belonging.

Honestly, some just can’t be bothered to perform at all and move on. They’ve decided, consciously or not, that their own comfort matters more than any discomfort their absence might cause.

None of that is straightforwardly wrong. Self-protection is real, and sometimes it’s the right call.

The problem isn’t always the missing part itself. The problem is how everyone else deals with these gaps, and how often they pretend nothing is wrong.

It Becomes All About You

When someone withdraws emotionally or physically, the instinct of those left behind is often to make it personal.

That reaction is human. But it’s also a kind of selfishness in reverse: taking someone else’s absence and centering it on themselves. There’s no real curiosity about what the other person is carrying. It turns into judgement, then resentment, then a story that calcifies over time. That’s not just ego. It’s willful ignorance.

Not because disagreement is wrong, but because some systems don’t allow your truth. They feed on your reaction. They take your words and use them differently from what you intended, reshaping them into whatever their stories need. They need you to respond so there’s someone to blame, someone to point to, someone who keeps the whole thing running. You become the common “threat” to their system.

And the actual dynamic, which was probably never healthy in the first place, never gets examined, never gets talked about.

Only to Find Out Later

Sometimes it takes years, decades even, to understand who someone actually was. You might have suspected. You might have felt something was off but didn’t have the language for it. And then one day the picture sharpens, and you realise you could have known this earlier.

People change. The opportunity to speak closes. The truth got buried under a system long held together by silence.

Letting Go, or Not

What keeps repeating is how much damage a single person’s unwillingness to let go can do. One grudge, held long enough, can quietly restructure an entire world. With no empathy, no accountability. The whole dynamic gets managed around that one person.

The hardest part to watch? Especially when someone new enters that dynamic, a partner, a younger person, anyone unfamiliar with the unwritten rules. They get cast as the difficult one who doesn’t fit, when actually the system itself was never right, and they’re just the first one honest enough not to play along.

Deep conversations stop. Others around continue performing versions of themselves to fit the “book cover”.

The Silence That’s Strong

Silence isn’t a treatment. Such withdrawal is more powerful than showing up at all. It is not the same as acceptance. It’s neither weakness nor avoidance. Sometimes it’s the clearest statement: you know what’s happening here, you won’t be part of it, and just like that, you become the missing part.

You know your truth. What you won’t do is allow it to be picked up, inverted, and used against you. That’s not silence from fear. That’s silence from clarity, a way of not letting it become a weapon, or a weight you carry into every room after.

Tragic, or Not

Some people hold onto resentment longer than they hold onto love. Even when everything else softens, age, illness, time, the grudge stays sharp.

There’s a particular sadness in watching someone carry a grudge all the way to the end. Long after circumstances change. Long after the original reason has blurred. And still, never allowing the missing parts to have a voice.

I don’t say this judgmentally. I say it with something closer to grief. What a weight to carry when you could have put it down. Ego. Pride. Or the inability to distinguish losing from letting go.

I just wanted to name these missing parts. Because pretending the gaps aren’t there doesn’t make them smaller. And we shouldn’t make this kind of silence feel more normal at all.

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