Time & Perspective Quote by Susan Griffin

Griffin turns “abandonment” from a private wound into a shared condition, and the move is quietly radical. She begins with the disarming admission of ordinariness: “not so different.” It’s an ethical pivot away from the specialness that pain can grant. In a culture that rewards the singular trauma narrative, Griffin insists on commonality without cheapening the hurt. The sentence reads like a letting-go of the ego’s most seductive story: that your loneliness is proof of your uniqueness.

Then she widens the lens with a three-part fracture: “the earth, each other, ourselves.” The escalation matters. This isn’t just about parents leaving, lovers failing, or friendships eroding; it’s about an estrangement built into modern life. “Split away” carries physical violence, as if separation isn’t merely emotional but structural - something done to us by histories of displacement, industrial life, and the mind/body divide that treats nature as backdrop instead of kin. The earth comes first, implying that the primary abandonment is ecological: we’ve been trained to live as if we’re not part of the ground that feeds us.

The subtext is political as much as intimate. If abandonment is universal, then repair can’t be only therapeutic; it has to be relational and environmental. Griffin, a writer long attentive to feminism and ecology, threads those commitments into a single claim: alienation isn’t a quirky personal pathology, it’s a worldview. The line works because it offers solidarity without sentimentality - and because it makes reconciliation feel less like self-help and more like rejoining a broken belonging.