Once I Was Whole

We are all of us born with incomplete souls.

No one tells us this when we are children. We are taught that the ache within us, which we are not always aware of, is hunger, or loneliness, or some other sort of failing that can be outgrown with time or discipline. We just need to power through, to find something to focus on to take our minds off of it and put that energy somewhere that the world deems more useful than the agony of waiting to find those missing pieces. They hand you books and toys and prayers and other people, hoping that maybe they will help us feel a little bit less like something inside of us is misplaced.

I think we come into the world fractured. That isn’t to say that we are broken. Being broken implies damage done, like a jar shattering after falling to the kitchen floor. This fracturing is older than damage. It is older than grief.

Plato had the right of it when he described the feeling of being whole in his Symposium. Humans were not always as we are now, with two arms and two legs and one sad, lonely heart; in the time of the gods, we existed with a doubled body. But as is the unfortunate nature of mankind, we were unsatisfied with what we had and tried to ascend to the realm of the gods to take Zeus’s power for ourselves. Instead of merely smiting our early ancestors, Zeus crippled us and took away our other halves so that we may spend our days running around in search of those missing pieces, only being satisfied once we had found them.

We are born with pieces of ourselves scattered across the earth like seeds cast far too wide, and we spend our lives wandering aimlessly in every direction without knowing what we are looking for. The wind has carried them too far for us to see, and so we spend much of our time earthside with a deep sense of longing for something that we cannot name.

Sometimes we find fragments in other people. In friends who understand our silence in ways that nobody else can. Those that can sit with us in the gathering dark and shed some light so that we may see our way through. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we find bigger pieces in a lover whose presence is enough to calm the storm that Zeus left behind in us when he broke us apart. Those are the ones that we stand beside within the framework of the puzzle and we are almost complete again.

But the deepest pieces, I think, are rarely hidden in other people. Or at least that is what it feels like for me. I have spent most of my life feeling the shape of that absence.

Depression is too small a word for it, I think. People hear it and imagine sadness, but sadness feels far too clean a way to describe it. It is temporary, more palatable, more understandable. This was something much stranger and harder to name. It was a lifelong disconnection from the world around me, as if I was the only one who had not been given a map or a guide of how to exist that I never received. I imagine it is somewhat similar to a chicken wandering around without a head and, inexplicably, still living.

Alongside that lived anxiety, sharp toothed and constant. It settles into your bones so deeply that you stop recognizing it as fear and start mistaking it for personality. Every interaction feels like a performance review you are failing in real time. There is danger around every corner, in the gaze of the person sharing the aisle at the grocery store, in every room. You become hyper-aware of yourself at all times, in every situation - from the tone of my voice, the timing and volume of my laughter, whether I was being too much or not enough. Existing around people sometimes feels like balancing on a wire while pretending that my legs aren’t crumbling underneath me.

When you live like that, you are forced to imitate belonging. You are forced to learn how and when to laugh so that you can fit in. You learn to sand down your sharp edges so you don’t cut the people around you. You shield people from the storm as best you can so they don’t mistake it for failure to manage or failure to thrive. Every day there are different versions of yourself depending on who is standing in front of you, and eventually, you become fluent in transition so you become easier to understand, easier to keep around, easier to love.

It’s something you get very good at when you spend a lifetime practicing. Good enough that most people would mistake you for being normal. Fine. Functional, even. But deep down, it’s not enough.

There is a constant feeling of not being built correctly, like there were pieces missing when they went to assemble me. I was missing a shelf, or perhaps load-bearing wall deep in my structure. Everyone else had roots tying them deeply to the earth while I floated slightly above it without an anchor, unable to fully touch down. Every room felt temporary, every version of myself performative. I drifted through life like a guest pretending to be a part of the family rather than someone who just was.

But despite all of that, despite how disconnected I have often felt from the world around me, I have been lucky enough to find small fragments of myself in other living things, mostly in animals. Perhaps it is because they exist outside of the rules we create for one another, or the fact that they don’t care about performance or success or if you manage to pack away the parts of yourself that are not as digestible to other people. They simply know you more deeply than other people can.

I have known many over the years, and each one that I have called mine completed parts of me that I didn't realize were empty to begin with. Looking back, there were so many signs before I met her. Little soul fragments finding their way back to me on four legs, bringing me love and joy in equal measure.

When I was younger and the sadness lived close to the surface of my skin, when I tried to carve it out in secret, Lara would follow me with a quiet vigilance that felt almost maternal. Every time I disappeared, either behind a closed door or within myself, she came looking to guide me home, pressing herself against me to anchor me back into my body. If I didn’t respond, she would paw at my limbs, inspecting me with worried eyes as if I was something fragile she had been tasked with protecting. I was hers to keep alive right until the end of her time.

And then there was Benji.

A stray before he became ours, he carried all the rough edges of a life spent surviving outside. He was so cautious for so long, he never really showed up unless there was food involved, keeping himself tucked away where nobody could touch him. But with me, something softened. He sought me out for affection with a quiet desperation that seemed to scream that I had kept him waiting for too long, curling himself into my lap like he had spent his whole life waiting to truly rest. Some animals love generally, spreading their affection like sunlight, but with Benji it felt as if his love was something he chose to share. Something inside of him had decided that I belonged to him specifically, and he shone for me for the short time I had with him.

Not long before Benji made his grand exit from the world, Gremlin came into it. My strange, sweet little man who wanders the house crying when he cannot find me, who brings his favorite toys to the door when I leave as if in offering to the gods to ensure I come back to him. Gremlin, who presses tiny kisses to my face and curls into my arms as if proximity alone can protect us both from the world outside, fearless as he is. He loves everyone, but not the same way that he loves me. I am his safe space as he is mine.

Maybe that is the closest thing to healing that I have ever known. To be loved not despite your fractures, but with complete indifference to them. To be chosen by those who can see the trembling parts of yourself and never once ask you to hide them. They have never once asked me to be smaller, or quieter, softer, or more normal.

The pieces of myself that I found within them simply loved me as though I had always belonged, and while they were here, it was as if I was never missing anything at all.

One day, I found another piece that made the weight of existing feel much easier to carry. Waiting lists were long, and the costs were exuberant with good reason - so much goes into training and preparing these creatures to exist alongside you out in the world. At first, it didn’t feel monumental - I hadn’t known, at the time, that I was meeting one of my fragments.Most life changing things rarely feel as big as they are when they start. There was no choir of angels, no divine revelation splitting the sky above my head. There was only the sound of paws against the floor, the soft exhale of breath as she examined me, eyes that looked at me trying to determine what I needed from her even though we had only just met.

She was just a service dog, right? She was there to help me re-join the world. I did not yet understand what it meant to be seen by something incapable of asking me to become anyone other than what I already was.

People, even the ones who love us the most, often love us through layers, through performance of a role, through language. Through the softened and curated versions of ourselves that we have spent years constructing for survival. Human love can be beautiful, but it is often tangled in expectation. In understanding. In being understood.

There was none of that here.

She didn’t care that I was nervous that day, talking in circles to distract from how badly I was shaking. She did not recoil from my sadness or ask me to explain the shape of it - she simply folded herself into the space that was left. She never once demanded that I transform myself into something easier to hold, she just existed beside me with the kind of devotion that asked for nothing but my presence, and perhaps a stuffed toy, in return.

Without realizing it, the world began to feel less hostile.

We hadn’t even known each other for long, but I already felt so safe being around her. She knew before I did that I was anxious and planted herself firmly between my legs to ground me back in reality. The idea of the grocery store became less daunting just thinking that, at some point, she would be with me. Leaving my small corner of the world felt like the chance at having a grand adventure rather than impending doom. My body seemed to unclench around her, as if the frightened animal that lived beneath my skin had decided it was okay to rest. When it was time for her to go back and learn to be an even better version of herself, she didn’t want to leave.

I think that was when I started to realize what she was to me. She wasn’t a pet, she wasn’t just a companion in the way that people usually talk about animals. She was one of those missing pieces, a part of my soul that had wandered the earth somehow finding its way back home. With her, I felt anchored. I felt real. In some impossible way, her addition to my world made me feel whole.

There is a danger in finding one of those pieces: sometimes the world asks for those pieces back. And no matter what you do, no matter how hard you cling to them or how much glue you coat your hands with, those pieces become impossible to hold on to. The power of love is a frightful thing indeed for the gods to feel so threatened by it.

And maybe that is the cruelest part of being human - not that we spend so long searching for our other halves, or that we love, but that we are asked to do it in a world that does not always allow for love to remain where it is needed. Things do not always unfold in the shape that we want, or need, them to.

You can plan carefully. You can build your life around fragile contingencies, convincing yourself that if you just account for enough variables, you will not be undone by the unexpected. You can tell yourself that love, once found, is something you can protect simply by holding it tightly enough, or loving it correctly enough, or being good enough. But life does not negotiate with intention. It interrupts, it rearranges. It takes the things we think are stable and quietly shifts the ground beneath them until you are no longer standing where you thought you were.

Sometimes the world asks for things that we didn’t realize we needed for survival. And you have to answer it anyway because you don’t have a choice.

There is something almost unbearably humbling about realizing that love alone is not always enough to make things work out, or to make life sustainable. That wanting something - needing it, being made better by it - does not automatically translate into being able to give it everything you have in return. Care is not only feeling; it is capacity, it is stability, it is structure. And sometimes, no matter how deeply you love something, your hands are already full of trying to keep yourself and your life from falling apart.

That is the part I did not understand at first. Or perhaps the part I refused to understand until I could no longer avoid it. Because how do you choose between the thing that makes you feel whole and the reality of what it requires to keep them safe, healthy, fully held in the way they deserve?

How do you admit that love, in its purest form, can still be unequal to responsibility?

The truth is there are moments where love becomes something heavier than comfort. Where it turns into grief before anything has even been lost. Where every future version of a life you imagined begins to collapse at the edges, and you are left holding the shape of something that cannot stay.

And I think that is where the fracture deepens again. Not from absence this time, but from necessity. From choice. From understanding, with a clarity that feels almost unbearable, that keeping her would not be the same as loving her well.

And so you begin to do the only thing that love sometimes demands in its most painful form: you let go. Not because the love is smaller than it was, but because it is not enough, on its own, to change what is required of the world around it. And that is a different kind of heartbreak than anything I have known before. Because she is still alive. Still loved so deeply and so fiercely. Still deserving of a life that does not bend around someone else’s immediate instability.

And somewhere, in a life I cannot fully touch anymore, she will be someone else’s miracle too. She will stop looking for me, and stop wondering where I am or what I am doing. She will rest her weight into new hands, learn new rhythms, learn to love in ways that are not connected to my name.

I wish I could explain to her that she was never just a temporary piece of my soul, but one of the ones I was never meant to keep without consequence. That she did not leave because she stopped belonging to me, or because I stopped loving her, but because I love her enough to understand that belonging is not the same thing as being right.

And so the fragment returns to the world, and I remain here, changed again.

Not whole.

Not broken.

But reshaped by the unbearable kindness of choosing her life over my longing to keep her inside mine.