Member-only story

Something is Missing from the Human Experience

S.J. Elliott
5 min readApr 27, 2021

--

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

It’s difficult to say when I first noticed the missing pieces. Some part of me feels like I’ve always been aware, and the level of awareness has simply grown to the point I can no longer ignore it.

Another part of me wonders if I ever knew anything, if I ever even noticed the struggles of another person with any kind of clarity before this point in my life — and if I didn’t see the pain, how many opportunities did miss to help, comfort, or just stand as a witness to another person reality?

Something is missing from the human experience. There are empty rooms in the hearts of millions, rooms that were once filled with the most powerful elixirs of life; Love. Compassion. Empathy. Kindness.

The capacity for understanding another's circumstances without judgment and opinion has shrunk dramatically. The level of tolerance for discomfort, horror, pain, and, yes - I’ll say it - violence, has grown to the point that murders of actual, real, human beings are broadcast across the world on a near-daily basis, and nobody (and by “nobody,” I mean a large swath of the global population) is batting an eye.

This is what we have come to know. This is what life, nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st Century, looks like. Is it race? Is it politics? Is it the economic ruin? Is it everything and nothing…

--

--

S.J. Elliott
S.J. Elliott

Written by S.J. Elliott

Aspiring story-teller. Ordained coffee connoisseur. I write about processing personal trauma, & my quest to be a better version of myself as a human/woman/wife.

No responses yet