The In-Between of Being Nine

A meditation on mattering

Written by AMANDA CHIRUMBOLO-MILLER
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When I was nine, I learned what loneliness felt like long before I had the words for it. It’s strange how early certain emotions arrive — how they slip into the quiet corners of a child’s mind and stay there, humming. I didn’t know how to name the heaviness in my chest or why the world sometimes felt dimmer from the inside. I just knew I felt invisible in a way that made everything echo.

Children are experts at hiding the biggest parts of their inner world. They laugh, they do their homework, they move through the day as expected — but inside, the feelings are enormous, unstructured and alive. I remember sitting alone, wondering if anyone would notice if I vanished for a while. It wasn’t a fantasy about dying — I didn’t understand anything that complex. It was the seed of a question I had no language for:

Do I matter enough to be missed?

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