The Hole
What is identity? What a question to be grappling with for what seems like so many years, at my oh so ripe age of 31. I’m sure older, wiser people would laugh… “oh Hunny you have no idea…:” Yes I’m sure this preponderance is one of many phases I will go through in my hopefully long life.
When it feels like you have been stripped of all you’ve known about yourself, when things continuously pop up to challenge your beliefs, your routines, your structures of what you have built your life upon it begs many questions. What the hell am I supposed to be doing, what is this, who am I? I understand this feeling is ubiquitous and not original. While at the same time, it feels isolating. It feels lonely. It feels like I am the only one. I guess there is solidarity in human suffering.
I have privilege of being safe, of being taken care of, and not having any real serious emergencies in my life. I have shelter, I have health, I have love… but yet these questions are there. The despair is still there.
I’ve left jobs, I’ve got a masters degree, I’ve moved abroad, I’ve wiped my slate clean. I’ve been injured, I’ve rerouted. We’re in a pandemic, my body is changing. I’ve made new friends, I’ve coped with being away from my family. I’ve sustained a 5 year relationship and been through ups and downs I never thought someone would be willing to endure with me. My life is completely different to any sense of goals or imagination I could have had 5 years ago. But where is up and where is down? Where is the direction I thought I had… where am I?
I keep waiting for the tears to come, to have some grand release. To have everything click, to feel whole. I keep waiting to feel whole. So many lost ideas and lost expectations. I thought I’d be a therapist, I thought I’d have an identity through work. I thought my body would continue running forever. I thought I’d always look the same. I thought I’d always be in control. I thought I’d always have my freedom, my choices. Naivety, ignorance, how I miss those things. The bliss that comes before reality interjects. Before gravity and time takes hold.
It’s easy to look back with rose tinted glasses, and view what I see was hope and opportunity, and easily forget the loneliness, the emptiness I felt at the same time. I was only distracted. I was only distracted by a goal at the time. Now, in a state of uncertainty, of wondering, of aimlessness, I have no distraction. I feel the deep despair of the void. I feel the depth of the hole in my heart. I don’t know where the hole came from. Is this the hole of lost self? Of lost innocence? Youth? What was there before a hole was formed? Is my identity at the bottom of this plunge? The questions… how do I retrieve myself from this place of nothingness.
This isn’t a text of depression or of negativity. For I still hold much optimism. I still know, among everything, that things do change, and lessons from life are learned. I know this feeling is only now. I know I will feel joy again, and I will feel whole. At the same time I’m keenly aware this hole is there. It’s not going anywhere and it will never be filled. The constant search to fill the hole is what leads to despair. You can’t fill the hole, the hole is just part of you. Like that mole off to the left side of your mouth or the single grey strand on your head. It exists and you must accept its existence to move forward.
