The Light In the Void:

On Letting Go of Wholeness

“The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day.” – Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

There is an annoying piece of folk wisdom, much cited in self-help and pop psychology, that you cannot authentically love others until you love yourself, which is an observation that rings intuitively true for many people but unfortunately also tends to land as judgey and impractical just as often.

This is largely because what the truism misses is that it is also obviously much easier to love oneself when one has received the safe, kind, and consistent love of others. For the great many of us whose formative years included some version of significant unsafety, unkindness, and inconsistency from those around us, “loving ourselves” is a fraught concept – rather like telling a person at the bottom of the ocean that they’d be able to breathe if only they’d learn to accept the value of oxygen.

Most contemporary self-help perspectives on love and attachment psychology (the study of how human beings experience intimacy with one another) teach us that it is a losing game to try to find a sense of psychological or spiritual wholeness in an external source – particularly if that external source is another person. As adults, we are told, it is not healthy to reach out for connection and fulfillment from a place of lack within ourselves – we shouldn’t try to fill the void inside with attention from other people, or with psychoactive substances, or with gambling or overwork.

For example, popular meditation teacher Cory Muscara writes to his audience of over 750, 000 Instagram followers: “Desire arises from the place in you that is full. Craving arises from the place in you that is empty.” Here, Muscara alludes to a highly distilled version of a philosophical concept shared across several ancient spiritual traditions; namely, that grasping or clinging to external relief from suffering only leads to further suffering – a  complex notion that is perhaps best understood through periods of extensive contemplation within a culturally grounded context rather than through reading 30 word social media posts.

Applied to psychotherapy and self-help, the pop culture version of this ancient idea admonishes us not to seek connection from the place of craving, of emptiness. Rather, we are advised to do our own inner work, to heal our inner children and repair our psychic wounds, that we may reach through the shadows toward the beloved Other from the radiant beauty of our own completeness – a compelling idea, certainly. Who wouldn’t love to be whole?

The trouble, however, is that “wholeness” is an elusive, or perhaps even illusory, concept, particularly within a capitalist dominant culture that tends to commodify healing as a product that can be purchased or an achievement that can be won: Just heal your insecure attachment, and then you will be loveable. Purge your psychological impurities, then you will be worthy. Fill the hole inside you so that you can be whole.

Yet a fundamental truth of human existence is that suffering and incompleteness are an inextricable aspect of relating to ourselves and one another; and the unrelenting pursuit of healing, fixing, and self-efficacy can itself become a form of spiritual clinging that suffocates aliveness. For most human beings – messy, wounded, contradictory, blinkered creatures that we are – “wholeness” in the sense of a static and permanent state of being is a moving target, an impossible standard to reach.

What would become possible if, instead of fetishizing wholeness, we embraced the gift of what is broken?

***

“You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?” – Janet Fitch, White Oleander

I don’t know how long I’ve carried a void inside myself, only that it’s been with me for as long as I can remember. When I look at it through the eyes of my imagination, I see a bottomless ocean with inky depths and hideous fish within, a giant pit full of rotting wood and squirming maggots, the icy expanse of outer space with no life-bearing planets in sight.

At times, it’s felt like that void would swallow me whole, drown me, suffocate me, annihilate me with my own longing. At others, I have been pulled away from the edge by the beckoning hands of friends or lovers, or by the shimmering promise of a world full of projects, purpose, and emergent beauty. Yet always the void has been there, its jaws gaping open in the depths of my consciousness. Waiting for me to return.

Most psychotherapeutic approaches would have me search for the origin of the void inside me, locating its roots in some form of traumatic past experience. This seems plausible enough. Where should I begin? With my teens and the disturbingly ethically ambiguous sexual experiences I had with a camp counselor? In early adolescence, perhaps, when I first developed an attraction to other boys at a time when jokes about shooting homosexuals for fun were the fashion among most of my classmates? Or maybe earlier, around the age of four or five, and all those times that I played “princess” dress-up games, all the times my child self talked about wishing to be a girl, and my family of origin reacted with violence and disgust?

Or should I go back even earlier, to before I was born, to the intergenerational trauma of forced migration and the Chinese diaspora, to my grandmother’s severe, untreated psychosis in rural Canada in the 1960s and its impact on my mother? To the racist burning of Chinatowns on the West Coast of Canada where my father’s family settled? To the invasion of the Japanese in the Second World War, to the Chinese Civil War, to the decades of famine and instability experienced by my poor rural ancestors? To the Boxer Rebellion? The Opium War? How far back am I meant to go?  The void is bottomless, it stretches endlessly into the past. If we’re being honest, I could sink forever.

Perhaps it’s better to examine all the ways that I’ve tried, consciously and unconsciously to fill the void inside me – to heal it, shrink it, make it disappear. I’ve sought out mental health treatment and had some good results despite the fact that like many trans women of colour, I’ve had some difficulties accessing safe and competent care. I’ve also become a workaholic, pouring vast amounts of energy and time into my own practice as a wellness provider.

 I’ve made art, written books, manically creating in the middle of the night. I’ve done activism and community organizing, hurling myself into dangerous and unsustainable situations trying (unsuccessfully) to repair the wounds in the world that mirror the wounds in my soul.

I’ve tried exercise and self-care, yoga, meditation, walking ten to fifteen thousand steps per day, keeping a dream journal and seeing a life coach. I’ve gotten into kettlebells and skin care.

Most of all, I’ve tried to fill the emptiness inside me with love – love, love, love, always love, till I’m blue in the face and choking on it. I’ve tried loving others, I’ve tried loving myself, I’ve thrown myself into love in its metaphysical permutations – love for the earth, for God and the gods. I’ve dated dozens of men, a few viciously abusive, most of them normatively terrible, and few who were truly lovely. I’ve been monogamous and polyamorous. I got married to a wonderful person in a beautiful wedding. Twice. I’ve worked so hard and been so lucky.

Still, the void yawns wide open within me.

***

“Do not ask how ocean’s blue, or why the tides their time do keep. To love is simply to know this: the tides are true as the ocean is deep.” – Callum, character in The Dragon Prince

There are some baseline personal and relational competencies that a functional and ethical life among human beings requires from us all: The ability to manage our emotions and impulses, for example, at least to the extent that we do not act violently or exploitatively towards others. We need to be able to know the difference between our own desires and the desires of another, which is to say that we need to understand interpersonal boundaries. We need to be able to reflect upon our own errors in judgement that hurt or harm other people and determine how best to not repeat them.

These are skills that can be intentionally cultivated, they comprise the practical side of healing work and I deeply believe in their worth and necessity. I also believe that the vast majority of people can learn and grow these skills to a large extent in the presence of supportive communities and, in some cases, specialized professional help.

Yet I do not believe that it is viable, or even desirable, to create a world in which intense emotional pain is relegated entirely to the world of curable pathology, a pitiable illness or a sign of arrested moral development. To do so is to elide the meaning of humanity itself.

Perhaps what I am trying to say is simply that I am tired of trying so hard to complete myself, to be the one I am looking for, to find the cure for the empty space in my soul, the sadness and the ever-present voice whispering that there is something missing, something broken, something wrong with me. Tired of fixing myself, of being fixed, of trying to explain myself with personal and social histories of oppression, trying to be sane, trying to be worthy of love, worthy of loving myself. Tired of clinging to the edge of the void with my fingernails, trying so hard to not fall in.

So I let myself descend. Let myself feel the icy waters, the crushing pressure of the depths. The sensation of falling into the deep pit with its rotting wood and squirming maggots, the vast expanse of lifeless space. Let myself be inside the sadness, the despair, the insanity, the shame, the belief that I am bad because I didn’t cure myself, because I let myself be abused, because I didn’t say no, because of all the terrible things I did to survive, because I failed so many times to be a better person. Maybe no one will ever love me enough to make that feeling go away. Maybe I’ll never love anyone enough to deserve it. There’s peace in letting those possibilities be real.

Here in the dark, what I know for certain is that all I am and any good that I’ve done is deeply connected to everything I’ve done wrong and everything I’ve failed to be. There is no beauty, no art, no creation and no drive towards connection without my pain, my despair, my mistakes and my emptiness. That emptiness will never leave me because it is me. That yearning will never be silenced because it is my own soul speaking. And when I stop trying to fill myself, falling into the pit and flying don’t seem so different after all.

I am the void, and the void is me. The darkness within is full of stars.