I turned 38 last month, but every year on November 4, I’m a 12-year-old who’s never been more alone in the world in her whole life, before or since.

My father left when I was in sixth grade, a couple months after my eleventh birthday, following a failed suicide attempt in the first week of school. It was a year of numbness that coated my pain like frost on a forgotten pond. I moved through life like a zombie that year. You can see it in the dead eyes and vacant expression on my face in my school photo; though I’m not sure where that photo ended up, I remember it vividly. I remember looking at it and thinking, that is not the face of a mentally healthy child.

No one seemed to notice.

When the school year ended, I flew out to California to be with my dad. My intention was to stay there. It turned into a horrible, miserable situation that my father couldn’t or wouldn’t save me from, and in the end I flew back to the east coast on November 4, 2000, a month after I turned 12. I was shell-shocked and scared and defeated and so, so sad. I barely spoke in those first days back with my mother and new step-family (who I hated and who I knew in my core were not good people, and time proved me right). By the time I settled in enough to find functionality again, I had buried my pain and my memories and my trauma deep enough that even if anyone ever bothered to ask, I would have trouble knowing what to tell them. It wasn’t even so hard to box up in my mind, really; I was old hat at compartmentalizing my own life by then in deference to other people.

No one ever did ask. No one seemed to notice.

For many months, probably a couple of years, after I left California, I refused to talk to my dad when he’d try to call. I didn’t know what to say to him anymore. There was nothing left. Everyone tried to get me to talk to him, telling me he was still my dad, as if that was supposed to suddenly hold meaning for any of us now when it had been so long disregarded. He was my dad; well, I was his daughter. How about that? But nobody asked me why I didn’t want to talk to him. Nobody asked me why.

No one ever asked me why. No one seemed to notice.

He died when I was 18. We were able to visit him when I was like, fifteen or sixteen, and his parents and sister had flown out to California to arrange for his transfer to a long-term rehab center in Massachusetts where they lived, so they could better care for and support him, which they did, to the end. We visited only the once. He was still operating off his memory of me at 12 years old, assuming I was still working on becoming a marine biologist. The things he set in motion that led me to living against my will in upstate New York, far away from the coast, pretty much put the kibosh on that dream, but, what kind of teenage monster has the heart to tell their dying father that? A better one than me, I suppose. Finally, a chance for accountability, and I didn’t see the point. Especially when he went on to tell me that the California girlfriend lost custody of her daughters and they ended up living with their estranged dad and he felt really badly for them…what was the point of telling him about the irony staring him in the face? The man was literally blind by this time anyway.

He never stopped to think about that. He never seemed to notice.

And when he died, I gave a eulogy about mourning the father that I should have had.

I’m not sure anyone really noticed that either.

Today, I am a mother to a fantastic seven-year-old daughter. I ask her about her day, every day. I check in with her frequently, about all kinds of things about her life. I know what she does and where she does it and why she does it and who she does it with, at every moment I possibly can. I know what she likes, and what she hates. I know what she wonders about and what she wants and what matters to her. I know what she’s afraid of and how she works on overcoming her fears, and how far she’s come. I know how much she grows in a hundred tiny different ways every day. I know her, like I know every nook and cranny and mark on each of my hands. And so, knowing what I went through with this perspective in mind, I find myself brought to such anger.

How could no one have noticed that at twelve years old, I was drowning in despair? How could no one have noticed that in the years that followed, part of me shriveled and withered like a summer plant left to die in the autumn chill? How could no one have noticed that little girl suffering in such darkness?

I despaired, and then I burned with anger, and then I shut myself away…and no one ever noticed.

Twelve years old is a terrible age to be alone in the world. It’s been 26 years, but she still visits me every November, begging to be seen. I’m doing my best to keep her in my line of sight now, notice her, let her know that I recognize every crack and fissure in her heart, a heart as fragile as thin ice, a frigid, desolate landscape laid waste to decades of pain.

She didn’t deserve any of that pain. She deserved to be noticed by the people who were supposed to love and care for her. That shouldn’t feel like it’s asking for so much.

I live a life now that she would have considered unfathomable. Maybe that should be inspiring, or something. In the first week of November, it just feels like shit. I was 12 years old, and utterly alone, and had no time or space for hope that this would ever change. I had no reason on the horizon to believe that anyone would ever notice me, or if they did, that they’d bother to stick around long enough for that noticing to matter anyway.

I’m 38, and so grateful to have been wrong about that.

But every year, on November 4, I am 12 and alone.