Tell Me When I Did Nest in a Gut and I Was Born: Loneliness Updated These Days

Almost five months ago, it was published Tell me when I did nest in a gut and I was born an illustrated story that addresses, through metaphor and illustrations, the loneliness experienced when one has suffered abandonment at an early age, and is published by the publishing house Desclée De Brouwer.

Of those five months, three have been in this very special situation that we are all living in, where somehow We have been dragged, just like the protagonist of the book, to disconnection and to glimpse the world from the fish tank of our homes.

This situation contrary to our nature, just as contrary to the experience of not being held in the arms of the one who carried us in his womb, has inevitably dragged us to loneliness and abandonment.

A story that explores the theme of isolation

Addressing loneliness is always difficult, perhaps because we begin as two undifferentiated people inside our mother’s placenta and we develop looking at the face of the one who welcomes us into his lap. In that relational dance we discover ourselves and the world, in those eyes that look back at us we learn to feel through skin-to-skin contact and the prosody of the times they rock us.

And when that is missing something is lost, the opportunity to perceive, for that perception to be contacted and named and for that baby to discover its feeling, its existence. Without it, the emptiness of non-sensation seems to cover everything, the expression of the unknown body, lacking the friction of touch without contact that surrounds the passing of the days.

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When I reread the story and look at its illustrations, they take me to our immediate present, where security has robbed us of the joy of touch, where we have lost the open smile that illuminates the eyes in the encounter and the voice and listening are distorted in inexpression. of the mask.

We have been pushed by this unparalleled circumstance to our loneliness, dragged into the intermittent or continuous feeling of abandonment.

Sadness, the pain of uncertainty that does not know if it will be attended to and consoled, appears on our faces, even though it is hidden between decorated masks.

Tell me when I did nest in a gut and I was born

In the same way that the discovery of what is lost and the loving gaze that realizes what is missing helps heal the loss of connection, as told in the stories transmitted by the children who have shared their drawings in the book. In the same way, paying attention, comforting, realizing how we have lost in security traits of our humanity helps us comfort ourselves.

This encounter of comfort passes through the collective for discovering us as a group, as humanity, for serving us as a big family.

I leave you the video, a summary of this beautiful book that in its prosody sings of connection.