'Tell me when I did nest in a gut and I was born': an illustrated story

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, from metaphor and illustrations, the loneliness experienced when it has suffered abandonment at an early age, and that it is edited by the publishing house Desclée De Brouwer.

Of those five months, three have been in this special situation that we are all living, where in some way we have been dragged like the protagonist of the book to the 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 collected in arms for the one who has carried us in her womb, has inevitably dragged us to loneliness and abandonment.

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A story that explores the theme of isolation

Dealing with loneliness is always difficult, perhaps because we begin as two undifferentiated ones within our mother's placenta and we develop by looking at the face of the one who welcomes us in her lap. In this relational dance we discover ourselves and the world, in those eyes that give us back our gaze we learn to feel through skin-to-skin contact and the prosody of the times they rock us.

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

By rereading the story to him and looking at his illustrations, they take me to our immediate present, where security has robbed us of the enjoyment of touch, where we have lost the open smile that illuminates the eyes in the meeting and the voice and the listening are distorted in the expression of the face mask.

We have been pushed by this unique circumstance into our loneliness, drawn into the intermittent or continuous feeling of abandonment.

Sadness, the pain of uncertainty that does not know if it is going to be cared for and consoled, appears on our faces, even though it hides between decorated masks.

In the same way that the discovery of what is lost and that the loving gaze that realizes what is missing helps to heal the loss of the connection, as we are told by 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 safety traits of our humanity helps us to comfort us.

That encounter of comfort goes through the collective, for discovering ourselves as a group, as humanity for serving us as a great family.

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

Author: Cristina Cortes, Psychologist, Director of the Vitaliza Health Psychology Center