The Echo of Emptiness

When Having It All Is Still Not Enough

*Photo: Unsplash

I was always hollow. I didn’t know what to do with the emptiness inside me, so I tried to look away. I threw myself into anything I could: a beer after work, exercise, repainting the house, building furniture, woodworking, painting on clay, doing chores, writing. In the end none of it helped — it only demanded more of me to keep working as a distraction. Maybe work was the best of the lot. For years I lived as a workaholic, and I watched people praise me, envy me, or try to pull me down, and it made me feel that something was wrong. Whenever I held something in my hands I felt briefly relieved; the moment I let go, the hollow came back. I’ve only recently understood that those were temporary escapes — ways of postponing the unavoidable meeting with myself.

I hated enduring that long stretch of time. I wanted to sleep my life away, to make hours disappear. The boredom of repeating the same day over and over, the feeling of skirting the edges of anything that mattered — if I stopped, I thought I’d be found out. If I paused, the voice inside that said “I’m not enough” would roar too loud. I didn’t want to feel that helplessness wandering through a maze and never finding how to fill it. The faint brush of that feeling was actually the most important thing, but to avoid it I kept busy with other things. They were like tablecloths laid over the emptiness — under them you could still see the shape of the table. They were not real filling; at best they were temporary covers.

Being with people was another problem. I was there, but I felt glossed over by conversations that never reached what I actually wanted to say. Few people knew how to reach out when I wanted to be held. Though I sat beside them, there was no real communication. My heart remained closed. A thin faith wanted intimacy but would retreat from it, and so the empty place inside me got replaced by achievement. I thought it safer to fill what people couldn’t give by doing things I could: work, projects, measurable successes. It felt more controllable.

Even when I reached a goal, satisfaction lasted only a moment; hunger followed and I chased it again. Repeat, repeat — I ran inside a loop I had made. Over time I forgot what I was even running toward. I was running to avoid, and in doing so I became a shadow of the goal I’d set, dragged along by it.

Only after everything shattered did I realize: all that emptiness came from not having met myself. I understood that I would have to break through the center of that void before I could be ready to face myself. That is something: now I see a direction.

I realized that this emptiness comes from not living as my true self. It is the meaning of my life breaking apart. So I decided to meet myself. It is not easy. It’s like facing Dorian Gray’s portrait — the fear of confronting the hideous image of myself built up over years. The accumulated filth of time, the things I never wanted to look at, must be stared at head on. I need to pull up and look at the thing that denies my faith, my self-worth, my goodness. Like the hidden bulk of an iceberg, it is so vast that imagining it makes my body shiver.

Seeing the portrait of your darkness is not destruction but dismantling. It’s peeling off old masks one by one. It involves breaking down, but it is also the moment when real skin is revealed. My life was broken apart by forces beyond my control, and I’ve chosen to accept that moment. I was shattered by precise encounters at precise times, and that is why — paradoxically — this is the right time. Emptiness is something you can’t run from; it is the force that will set me free. I cannot stay still any longer. If I meet myself, I will touch the real me. Then, I think, I will be able to have heart-to-heart meetings with others.

The person I need to meet is, after all, no one other than myself.