The Descent of Awakening

When you get a pit in your stomach and a feeling of nausea, the kind with weight that you feel slowly over a long period of time, and you think without much sense that you must be going numb.

When you lose yourself in a myriad of emotions, you cry, you run to the toilet to be sick, and you worry about the people you love with a keen sense of loss and grief as if they are already gone, and you realize you have been numb for some time.

This is not when you go numb. This is when you begin to wake, when you begin to feel again. And in the midst of the bitterest feelings of sorrow, you think this must be the beginning and that things must get better from here.

But you’re not sure you really believe it.

Emptiness

Sometimes emptiness is so heavy it feels like its own substance. As if the hollowness of this absence is a weight your heart could never bear, an oppressive burden you seek to extract. Emptiness is not merely a void; it is far less abstract. There is no emptiness. Where loss leaves a space, it is soon filled with less than favorable emotions. Grief. Sorrow. Loneliness. Guilt. Regret. Longing. Saudade. Each a full, individual feeling, attempting to occupy the same empty space at the same time as each of the others, and no matter how large that space is, it can never hold them all, and every other space in your being is infiltrated by a conglomerate of emotions no one has yet learned how to entirely successfully deal with. No matter how much knowledge or experience we acquire, no matter how much we observe this affect, we will never conquer our fear of emptiness, or rather, our fear of overwhelming amounts of varied intense sentiments