#the void project

[04] protection

When I was 21 I started to notice that there were certain situations in which I would suddenly and completely disengage from my surroundings. There didn’t seem to be anything extraordinary that was triggering it, and I struggled to find a common theme amongst occurrences. It just seemed that every once in a while I would find myself a million miles away from whatever was going on, unable to access certain things that I had come to understand as features of my personality: easy-going sociability, loud laughter, compassionate patience, and general zestiness. At first it was an inconvenience that I chalked up to tiredness and irritability.

It got scary when I began to notice it happening. I understand better what brings on this phenomenon, and I can watch as the void begins to pool around my ankles, crawl up my back, and settle over my head and my heart, locking me in a haze that I still don’t know how to get out of. It happens fast, and while I know a little more about it, I still don’t really know how to stop it from happening, so there was, for a while, a terrifying inevitability to it. 

While it still scares me to be so immediately cut off from parts of myself that make me feel whole and happy, it has become less scary in learning that in some measure, this is the void trying to protect me from something. It usually begins when an argument turns sharp, when I feel like my feelings are about to be hurt, or when I feel like something delicate about me is about to be criticized. Sometimes it feels like an overreaction, and I wish I had more sturdiness of character so as to advocate for myself and handle other people’s sharpness without buckling. But knowing and loving who I actually am feels like such a new and precious thing, that I have a little more compassion for what the void is trying to do here. It’s shielding parts of me that are still growing so that they don’t have to weather the storms that they aren’t ready for. I feel confident that they will be ready some day, and I won’t always have to defend them so fiercely.

[05] scariness

1. For now I’ve decided that “scary” depends so much on what other people fear in another person or relationship that there’s no way I could ever track how scary I am or to whom I am scary. I have so little control of how I am perceived that the best I can do is be me and figure it out from there. Some will find me impossibly soft and harmless. Others will find me terrifying. I can probably be both.

2. My experience and expression of anger is a very new thing for me. Allowing myself to feel angry without immediately squashing and modifying the emotion has only begun to happen in the past couple of months. It is also in the past couple of months that people have told me I can be scary, or have seemed to perceive threat in my behavior and have reacted accordingly. What I have noticed in those moments is that I am upset at having been hurt, angry at having been treated unjustly, and unwilling to excuse the other person’s wrongdoing for them. 

With people that I really care about, I struggle not to protect them from shame. In situations where they act poorly and hurt me, I have, for my whole life, been quick to try and alleviate the sharpness of having hurt another person by promising them that I’m not actually hurt, that it wasn’t a big deal, that of course I forgive them, etc. I heard a lot about the importance of forgiving, letting go, and moving on, but was never told about the equally insidious poison of forgiveness constantly issued where there was no apology and there should have been. 

[01] introductions

This amorphous creature started to show up in all of my doodles, drawings, and paintings during my Junior year of college. It started out with a particular obsession with beady little eyes and grabby fingers in the dark of large spaces (forests, oceans, etc.) It seemed that no matter what I was making, I couldn’t resist putting the faintest whisper of something living into it. Darkness without something lurking in it didn’t make sense to me. There were three things that I felt particularly attached to:

1. It is meditative to make. To fill a large space with measured and intentional blackness required patience and labor. I wanted all of the little lines to show, so it was important not to get too sweeping and broad with my strokes. It became a practice of mindfulness, to notice when I was rushing to fill in a space, and force myself to slow down and continue making small, metered marks. 

2. It is fascinating to me to be able to bring something amorphous and inanimate to life with nothing else but the suggestion of eyes. Filling a space in with black, to me, often creates a huge block of NOTHING that doesn’t move, breathe, or do much. But as soon as something is looking back out at you, the space is full of possibility. What else could be in there? What does this thing in there look like? Why is it looking at me? Will I be safe? 

3. It became something that I used to project shame, anxiety, and the unknown onto. The summer before I turned 21 was the beginning of much higher levels of self-awareness in my life. For a while it was nice, but as I began to care about knowing myself more, I kept running up against things inside of me that felt ugly and unidentifiable. Looking back, I think it was the process of discovering how much of a grip shame had on many parts of my life. It was, and still is, terrifying to look at myself and see huge voids full of things that I didn’t know about me. The way I coped with that terror was to extract that void from myself and put it down on paper, slowly, deliberately, and without judgement. It felt like the only way to interact with the parts of me that were scary, or that I didn’t understand. It’s always easier if it’s someone (or something) else. 

[03] tenderness

Tenderness was the first feature of my emotional/experiential landscape that surprised me when someone pointed it out. I always had this image in my head of me as a cold, unflappable person. It was something I admired in other people and aspired to be myself, because cold people seemed to have power and didn’t seem to get hurt as easily. To be soft made you a target. 

I thought I was succeeding in being “scary and beautiful”, my ideal status of powerful woman that had a thick skin and didn’t get her feelings hurt because she was untouched by frivolous feeling, until I mentioned that ideal to a friend and she laughed and told me I could never be scary because I “love people too much to be scary”. 

To think and accept that I am not scary, that I have even remained soft in spite of my best efforts, has been an uncomfortable mental exercise. It has often left me feeling exposed and defenseless, vulnerable to the shitty things that exist in this world, the wounded things that lash out at softness in pain. But it has also grown a sense of peace and comfort in finally allowing myself to be the way I have deeply longed to be for most of my life. Deeper even than the desire to be untouchable, is the desire to be loved and handled gently and to do the same in return.

[06] mutability

Mutability is defined as the “liability or tendency to change”, and mutability as liability is something that I’ve been struggling with a lot lately. At its best I would describe it as a delight in spontaneity and surprises, a supreme flexibility and ability to bend and shift as needed in most situations. At its worst it feels like an arrogant disdain for plans, flakiness, an inability to follow through on anything if I feel even the slightest whisper of “I don’t want to”. 

I’ve spent good portions of my life being incredibly lonely and uncertain of my place in communities and, desperate to avoid the acrid pain of loneliness and unbelonging, I developed an effortless mutability that allowed me to (somewhat) comfortably be whatever seemed to fit best into a given social group. It is most easy for us to love things that are familiar and similar to us, and I think I have developed a habit of trying to be as similar to those I want to love me as possible so that loving me is effortless. Deeply rooted in my heart is the fear that I am not interesting or valuable enough to be loved if it’s too much work, so the only way to ever feel loved will be to make it as easy for others as it can be. 

As I begin to slowly know myself more, I notice places where I am bending and it is newly uncomfortable because certain parts of me are no longer pliable. I feel deceitful. I feel the sharp fear that if I can no longer bend this part of myself, I will not be lovable to these people and so I will not be loved. I see how this new thing about me could make me difficult to love and I start to hate the things about me that I recently rejoiced in discovering. 

[02] Manifestations

They always appear in one of two ways:

1. Large, black, amorphous. This version tends to be more maleable in shape, depending on what kind of environment they’re in. Finds itself in large spaces, lurking in forests, oceans, etc. Thematically, they appear when I’m processing something that feels more insidious or unknowable. They often appear alongside some visualization of myself. This feels like the version of void that I extract to try and relate to or understand. 

2. Human-sized, white, well-defined. This version is often found trotting around in place of myself, as the visualization of myself. This is the version that I have tattooed on myself, and the one that feels safe enough to be an interloping interceder in places that I want to know but am not able to physically enter. Thematically, they tend to represent a version of me that is well-defined enough to take up space, but not so defined as to invite judgement, assumptions, or projections of others. This feels like the version of void that I inhabit when I want to explore without being noticed.