The Void Within
Beauty and mystery of emptiness.
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I was thinking for a while which topic to choose for the very first letter of the year. I usually have multiple drafts from which to choose and my heart has called me to this one. On Volupta we touch many topics, seeking to include the entirety of woman’s inner and outer life, and today’s topic will be dedicated to that inner life (not that it is separate from the outer and vice versa!).
This topic is inspired by my conversations with women, as well as the correspondences with the women I mentor (my mentorships are fully booked for now and I am not taking new mentees but if you are interested once free, feel free to reach out). I express gratitude to my muses for the inspiration. Many women I talked and worked with confide in me about the feeling of deep emptiness within. It is a void-like feeling. Some of these women did have BPD diagnosis, but many did not, and I would dare say that the feeling is not exclusive to the women with this diagnosis.
It is important to say that I will not be sharing anyone’s private details but rather deliver a more general wisdom that came as the fruit of conversations and observation. I would also like to mention that this is not a clinical perspective or analysis. When it comes to that, your psychiatrist or psychologist are a better suit. This is the perspective of the experiential wisdom. The reason why I choose this topic as the first one is because I wished to initiate our communion this year with inwardness, vulnerability and openness that then allows for that voluptuous and rich life to appear. We tend to our soil in the dark of winter so that the spring can blossom, summer invigorate and autumn offer the most abundant harvest.
“I feel empty” or “I am so empty” is a sentence that a woman may utter a few times in her life. Usually, the emptiness is described as this deep void within. It is an absence — absence of sensation, of life, of love, of joy, of existence, of knowledge, of self, of light.
The world and conventional wisdom do not offer anything to her when it comes to knowing and understanding this experience. Just like anything else pertaining to women, this experience is automatically seen as pathological or approached with suspicion. On some subconscious level, the world treats it as the evidence of a woman’s inherent “lack”, less” or even evil. The world around a woman cannot receive her as she is but is rather constantly projecting its ideas of how she should be, usually separate from how she views and experiences herself. Hence, the external solutions do not “land” because they cannot relate to or understand a woman’s experience of herself.
Within a woman’s body, there is an emptiness. Womb is an empty space. Western psychoanalysis and much of philosophy, having logos-centric biases, could not help but pathologise this fact as well. It led to conclusions about woman as a defective, underdeveloped man or a void-like being without subjectivity or inner life.
