(W)hole

On Emptiness

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0. Empty

Clinical: “A feeling of emptiness is commonly encountered in clinical practice, but it is poorly understood, with incongruent approaches to its definition and possible role in various disorders. …Based on our literature review, we propose that a feeling of emptiness is a complex, negative emotional state that is experienced in different ways by different individuals. This feeling includes a physical or bodily component, a component of aloneness or social disconnectedness, and a component of a deep sense of personal unfulfillment or lack of purpose. The feeling of emptiness is related to other emotional states (dysphoria, boredom, loneliness, and numbness) and overlaps to some extent with them. Although the feeling of emptiness is most often considered in the context of borderline personality disorder, it is also encountered in depression, narcissistic personality disorder, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, with its features potentially varying between different conditions.”¹

Colloquial:

I. Somatic

Something is getting scooped out of me. I don’t know what it is but I can feel it getting lifted out.² When I was a teenager the boy I was in love with worked in an ice cream shop. At the end of every summer we’d all ask him to flex and laugh at how much bigger one of his arms had gotten. Ask to squeeze the bicep and I’d hold onto it a little longer than necessary. I had loved M since elementary school and I remember the day that I realized that it was different, that we were more than friends—or that I wanted us to be more than friends—M wasn’t in school and when I asked one of his classmates where he was they said that he’d broken his collarbone. I remember feeling³ like something rough had run through me (but that won’t happen for years) and then like something was spilling out. I started sobbing. No one could get me to stop. The other kids started laughing because that’s what kids do when they’re uncomfortable. Later on, when they’re grown, that laughter will calcify and turn into cruelty but when you’re seven the world is simpler and everyone still has a chance at turning out ok. I’ve never believed in the cruelty of children.⁴ I have believed, perhaps too deeply, in the cruelty of adults and their ability to press that cruelty onto the children around them so that at first it’s imitation (if you don’t have homemade cruelty then store bought is fine) but soon soon soon it’s real.

Note 4

But that was later. Then when I couldn’t stop crying and the other kids were laughing there was an adult who understood the opportunity of the moment and gathered them and hushed them. Told them that they should never laugh at one person for caring about another. And so they hushed. And I cried and cried in the corner. I don’t know what started leaking out of me then. I don’t know what burst open but it feels like it’s finite. Like it’s not coming back.

When E left the crack got wide wide wide and ever since then almost every minute of every day I can feel it leaving me. A song will come on, the light will hit the wall a certain way, the dog will sigh and there it is. Scoop. Do you want a double for twenty-five cents more? Scoop. A triple? We can dip it in chocolate. Scoop. Scoop.⁵ I get so tired, you know? At first, back with M, I thought it might be co-dependence. Then I thought it again when E left. Poor boundary control. Not enough of a wall between me and the outside world. I’m too porous. Too much coming in, rough, not mine. Too much pouring out of some hole that got made by the big rough thing(s) running through me. How much is left to lose? A question I ask myself when I’m surprised there’s still more that can be taken. “A subjective feeling of emptiness” is the diagnostic criteria attached to a host of clinical diagnoses but it’s not that I feel empty. It’s that I am emptying. It’s leaving me. I don’t know what, but it’s leaving me.

And when it goes?⁶ Gd. When it goes.

II. Alone

I am not, what I would consider, a lonely person—but I am often alone. I think these are different: alone versus lonely. Alone is a descriptor of a physical state but lonely is an emotional one. I spend most of my time alone, especially now that E is gone.⁷ And sometimes it’s like it always was. Walking across the Charles River in Boston, watching the cormorants bob, lackadaisical, with the current. In this moment I am alone but I am not lonely. I’ve made a decision to stop dating—not because I don’t want to be in love but maybe because I want it too much. Ten years later I am in a different city and there are no cormorants when E leaves. I am suddenly a thing I did not know I knew how to be anymore. I am lonely. All day long there is something to say and no one to say it too. I start a note of things I wanted to tell him but couldn’t.

12/11/24 3.42PM

I’m making the mushroom thing you used to make. I’m gonna make it wrong but it’ll be good.

12/12/24 11.30AM

Saw two hummingbirds fighting.

12/16/24 8.46AM

I woke up and there was a big pit in me again. Sinking feeling at the center of everything and I got scared that things would be bad today. I went to smoke a cigarette on the roof and when I came inside l the dog was on the bed and while I was petting him he threw up all over the comforter. I started to clean up and then felt worse so sat down to write this. How am I supposed to get anything done without you?

12/16/24 3.07PM

Ran into N on the street. She’s taking drum lessons—which is very cool. Very N. She asked me if you left and I said yes. She said she couldn’t imagine the pain. I bit back You’ll be able to someday and replaced it with I hope you never can instead.

12/18/24 9.51PM

Just ate peanut butter and crackers for the first time since you left. Didn’t cry.

12/18/24 10.43PM

Every time I get home I hope you’ll be here.

12/26/24 11.52PM

Just realized I’ve been dating all of my writing with the wrong year for the last week and a half.⁸

But doing this makes me feel lonelier so I stop.

Note 8

Every time I write one down it feels like I’ve put a needle through something. Something that shouldn’t have holes in it. And then something is reaching into me and scooping out—through the little holes that are getting bigger now. I squeeze M’s bicep; I squeeze E’s bicep. I stand in the kitchen squeezing a pear. It’s not ripe. Everything around me feels unready, unfinished. I feel astonished by how devastating everything is. Loneliness is astonishing. I feel like an empty set of parentheses. I’m trying to close but there’s nothing to wrap around. There is no center. I’m trying to explain but the words are losing their meaning. Loneliness isn’t an emotion, it's a state of communication. The lack of it. I can’t communicate what I feel anymore, to anyone, and so I’m lonely.

Before there was the river and the river birds and I could tell myself my own story and it made sense. I made sense. But now words aren’t making sense. When I write down the things I wanted to say to E and then revisit them I can’t find the meaning in them. I can’t remember if things ever meant anything at all. Loneliness is scooping the words out of me, the meaning out of the words. I am supposed to understand that suffering is temporary and through that understanding I am able to make meaning of it. Through the ability to look back at a distance (This is all too raw still, my editors tell me over and over again). I should see that there was a logic, a reason, or at least something to make of it. But I’m lonely because there’s never any distance. Everything is pressed in too close—everything is happening all at once. Language falls apart without linearity, without sequence. If one thing doesn’t happen after another, if the words don’t line up, if this word doesn’t reliably follow the previous one then there’s nothing to make. There’s nothing to make of this. It is 1998 and I am so sad. It’s 2009 and I’m so sad. It’s 2025 and I am so sad. It’s not getting better. This is a sadness that just gets deeper.

III. Purpose

You’re supposed to do something with your life other than die in it. I know this. My therapist says, How would you describe yourself if you couldn’t talk about your work? which is a question that everyone knows I don’t have an answer to. Which is embarrassing because work does not feel like living. Which is embarrassing because all the work I’ve done is ‘cause based.’ Which is embarrassing.⁹ Once I asked a friend’s mom if I should go to law school and she told me that if I thought going to law school, becoming a lawyer, would create a seat at the table for me that I was wrong. They don’t want us at their table, she said. The only way to have a seat at the table was to make one. Or make a new table.

So I tried to make chairs and tables. Dining room sets for justice. But nothing feels like it's getting better. I make more money for a spell but then I’m broke again. The world seems like it’s more just for a spell but then fascism. You live long enough and you start to see everything repeat so you start to wonder what the point of anything is?¹⁰ Time is a flat circle, someone says on TV and now it’s all I think about.

Note 10

Sitting on the roof smoking a cigarette is somehow sitting on every roof I’ve ever been on smoking a cigarette. Everything is an echo of something else but I can’t find the original thing. At a certain point every man’s face started looking familiar and when I mentioned that to a friend who works in genetics they shrugged and said, Well there are really only so many faces to make. Which seemed both obvious and startling. What do you mean we’re running out of faces? Did we already run out of them? If my face is walking around on someone else are they sad too or did they get all the happiness our face was allotted and so I got what was left? Maybe that’s what this feeling is. Maybe I’m being emptied out to feed their life. To keep it light, keep it buoyant. In folklore the doppelganger usually replaces the original at some point so maybe that’s where all my scooped out insides are going. Every day they become more solid, more dependable, their life unfolding with all the little moments of joy that have gone missing in mine. Something happened when I started doing things for other people, I don’t know how to do them for myself anymore. I think I’m waiting for a feeling I remember to come back. The solid stable feeling of a clean kitchen or folded laundry that used to give me the soft rose of accomplishment, of a job well done. But now I’m waiting for E to come down the stairs and see a clean kitchen, see me turning off the water and draping the dishrag over the edge of the sink and say, Wowwww. Clean kitchen! and put his arms around me and kiss me from behind but that doesn’t happen anymore. There’s just silence when I finish, just a skip, like time lurching. Scoop. Something is gone and then sadness rushes in. I don’t know what to do next. I can’t come up with a reason for doing anything next. That’s what purpose is, afterall. A reason to do the next thing. I don’t know why I’m doing anything anymore.

On Grindr a faceless torso messages me and says Hey, again. I ask them who they are. Dude, it’s Brent. I am famously bad at many things but also famously too good at memory and I do not know a Brent. Do I have a doppelganger? I ask. I guess so haha. I let the conversation die. I can’t decide if them mistaking me for someone else is racist or a sign that my other half is strafing close. Making the final preparations to take the last of me. They’d be a whole person, wouldn’t they? Full up.¹¹

Final Note

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Endnotes

1. Allen, J. G., Coyne, L., & Console, D. A. (1997). Dissociative detachment relates to psychotic symptoms and personality decompensation. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 1(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1300/J229v01n01_03

2. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

3. D'Agostino, A., Pepi, R., Rossi Monti, M., & Starcevic, V. (2020). The Feeling of Emptiness: A Review of a Complex Subjective Experience. Harvard review of psychiatry, 28(5), 287–295. https://doi.org/10.1097/HRP.0000000000000269, emphasis added

4. Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)

5. McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality structure in the clinical process (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

6. Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 416–420.

1. D'Agostino, A., Pepi, R., Rossi Monti, M., & Starcevic, V. (2020). The Feeling of Emptiness: A Review of a Complex Subjective Experience. Harvard review of psychiatry, 28(5), 287–295. https://doi.org/10.1097/HRP.0000000000000269, emphasis added

2. Allen et al. note that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) frequently produces psychotic spectrum symptoms, which could include “hallucinations in multiple sensory modalities” including the physical sensation of being hollow. Allen proposed that persistent and pervasive dissociative detachment loosens the moorings of the inner and outer reality and can lead to personality decompensation. I’m always leaving myself behind, you know?

3. “When you talk about most of your life you say ‘think’ but when you talk about writing you say feel,” my therapist says. Just a bit of loosening.

4. Children are, definitionally, existentially dependent for everything—including their world views. If the people they rely on are not reliable or well intentioned then the child has to choose between accepting that reality or denying it. If they accept it, accept that the world is not to be trusted, cannot be trusted then they might generalize that life is broadly cruel and meaningless and be left with a lifelong sense of emptiness and despair. If they deny it they may conclude that the source of their unhappiness is internal—preserving the hope that happiness may someday appear. If they can just cut the right part of themselves out. Which are you?

5. Allen notes that dissociation is a three-legged stool, consisting of absorption and imaginative involvement (which is just a way of saying aggressive daydreaming), depersonalization and derealization (this is what’s happening to me), and amnesia (this is what I wish would happen to me). Absorption is the most normal (common & benign) form of dissociation where amnesia is the most pathological (least common & probably not benign). However it is absorption (bad daydreaming), simple moments of consistently separating from the self, that most strongly correlate w/ psychosis. In effect to be overly engrossed in one facet of experience is apparently to detach from every other. Over time that robs us of our internal anchors, the sense of being connected to the self, to the body, to our own identities—it is not the imagining that is the problem, it’s the leaving. It’s the emptying.

6. People w/ severe PTSD are effectively continually shifting in and out of dissociative states. Van der Kolk notes that once a person learns to dissociate in response to trauma they continue to do so in the face of subsequent stressors. Like riding a bike. A bad bike. Dissociative detachment, over time, may hamper reality testing and leave the individual (me) “vulnerable to the nightmarish inner world.” Cool.

7. D.W. says that the capacity to be alone is actually based on a developmental milestone which is the capacity to be alone with someone else. Which is the sort of thing a psychoanalyst would say so as always he wants it to be about the mother. And as always I am bored. But to be alone and not lonely might be the experience of freedom from persecuting anxiety (is everybody mad at me and that’s why i’m alone?) or the ability to summon and hold a positive notion of the self even when no one is there to confirm that notion (can’t someone please tell me I’m doing a good job?). I am, just for fun, bad at both of these things.

8. It’s not uncommon for people with dissociative issues like PTSD or schizoid personalities to struggle with communicating. McWilliams notes that they (we) often feel alienated inside their (our) own speech. I’m doing it now. It’s happening to me now. But anyway when we arrive at the site of therapy devastated by our own isolation McWilliams says it’s because our inability to feel like we fit in has grown too large to manage or, perhaps worse, we’ve lost one of the very few people we feel close to. “I want you to know that I want to talk to you, but it hurts too much.” I want to call E every day and tell him that I love him. But that hurts too much. So I don’t. My therapist says that eventually maybe I won’t want to call. I wonder if that means that I also won’t love him.

9. Lauren Berlant talks about how the relationships we form w/ people & w/ our work are always a form of optimism because when we talk about the thing (job, significant other, car, whatever) we’re really talking about a cluster of possible futures we want someone or something to make real for us. I wanted my job to make my suffering worthwhile and I wanted E to make it possible for me not to suffer.

10. I used to think I’d die for justice but now i’m just trying not to die y’know?

11. Berlant says that what makes our optimism unsustainable (she calls it “cruel”) is that we start to need whatever we’re attached to in order to make sense of what it means to keep living—to keep looking forward to waking up and being in the world again. Even when the attachment doesn’t feel good anymore. Han says that all that clinging to possibility makes us tired. The kind of solitary tiredness that isolates us. E and I trying to find one another again, through the thicket of hopes we’d attached to each other. I was never tired of him. But I was tired of hoping something would change. That it would feel good again. You get so beat up by hope, y’know?