Letting You See My Emptiness
“I don’t feel anything.”
I’ve always felt that most things felt by mental illness sufferers are just extremes of things that every human being is capable of suffering. Yet the one thing that I grapple with most, which provides me with a constant struggle is emptiness. Emptiness isn’t simple. It’s not the low grief that comes with despair, and it’s not the manic joy that comes with happiness. Emptiness is a failure of the mind to find anything worth feeling or caring about.
I struggle with emptiness. For me, Borderline Personality Disorder comes with the sentence of emptiness but I spent most of my life believing that people all felt like this. The thing about emptiness that tears me apart though is how lonely it is. Even writing this, I struggle to put into words how best to describe this feeling. The feeling itself is bad enough, and the simple way to put it is that it feels like you care for nothing or nobody at all. You could be loved dearly by so many people, yet still feel the pull towards reckless and intense actions that give you some semblance of being alive again. But the feeling of emptiness isn’t the greatest pain.
The greatest pain is the isolation that comes from being empty. The greatest pain is one of the people you love most in this world looking you in the eye and asking you what’s wrong. The greatest pain is finding it in you to be honest with them, and still falling short because you just can’t make them understand what this feels like. The greatest pain is that you begin to realize that despite having so many people in your life, you’re going to die alone because you can’t show anyone else the emptiness.
I think this chronic emptiness can then damage what you do have. When we are incapable of feeling anything by constantly adding to our lives, the mind begins to feel that the only option is to take things away. Before we’re even cognizant of this fact we might start picking fights with those that we care about. Our mind will twist us to make us feel that they don’t really love us. Because of course, if they loved us, they would understand. In those moments when fury is bred by the void, we’re most at risk of losing sight of the fact that just because somebody doesn’t understand something, doesn’t mean they don’t try.
It’s hard not to take it personally. You open yourself to someone that you love. You let them see you and know you, in your most authentic way. But then you realize they're not capable of understanding you. They disappoint you. Just like everyone who’s ever seen you has. And the result is that instead of feeling more connected, you’re more alone than you’ve ever been.
It’s here that the greatest questions arise. Can we love something we don’t understand? We’re all capable of enjoying a piece of art that’s not entirely simple, or consuming media with near limitless interpretations. We can still love these things, but can we love people without fully understanding them?
Dear reader, I wish I had a better answer to offer to you, but the truth is that I do not know. Everyone I’ve ever shown myself to has either left because it’s more than they can handle, or I’ve judged them as unworthy because they didn’t accept who I was. More than anything else though I’m afraid that there exists nobody who can understand this emptiness and ennui that I wake up with every day.
I fear that sooner rather than later, I’ll be aware that I’m setting what I have left on fire because I would take the pain over nothing at all. I fear that I’ll feel this way forever. More than anything I fear I’ll be alone, not because I’ll have destroyed by relationships, but because those I love will begin to believe that I’m incapable of being open and honest with them.
After all, how can we expect anyone to stand by our side, when we admit to them that fundamentally, despite all their love, they aren’t good enough at making you feel something. Think of a billion different ways to dress up that conversation but in the end, being honest with someone about feeling this empty is bound to be taken the wrong way.
I struggle with emptiness. Because despite everything else, it’s not something I can make anyone else understand. It poses me with the question of faith, especially faith in others. The price of not living with the isolation that emptiness brings is honesty, and here the price of honesty is submitting control. The price of honesty is being at the mercy of someone else. It’s a price I try to evaluate every moment of every day.
