I Just read An extraordinary essay by Anna Parker For this site, it lit a fire in my mind. Parker interviewed Yannick and Ben Jacober, whose daughter died at nineteen. In their grief, they began building a unique collection of 165 children’s corpses from the 16th to 19th centuries, many of whom did not survive into adulthood. The paintings are devastating, captivating, sometimes disturbing; She is moved and unsettled by this extraordinary memorial to parental grief.
There was one particular line in the piece that overwhelmed me. Exploring the drive to continue adding painting after painting to the gallery they built, Ben spoke of “kinophobia, the fear of empty rooms or voids: ‘When there was space there, we had to fill it.’”
I cannot understand the never-ending pain of losing a child, but I do understand that horror of emptiness, this compulsion to fill space; I think everyone can do it. This is the phobia of our minds – a fear not of empty rooms, but of the empty feeling inside. A fear we must face if we want to build a better life.
We do all kinds of things to superficially try to fill the void in our lives and defend ourselves against that feeling. I have pointed this out as a therapist to patients in my consulting room – and tried to deny it as a patient in my analyst’s consulting room. We may try to escape the feeling by having sex, taking drugs, or over-exercising; We may try to hide the emptiness from others and from ourselves with envious Instagram Stories. We may unconsciously try to distract ourselves by dramatically separating and making up with friends and partners; We may try to fill the space by eating a lot or shopping online.
Would capitalism survive if we were not constantly striving to fill this void? Perhaps each political ideology is just a different false solution to the same problem.
I think it could also be part of the untold story behind people’s experiences with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, emotionally unstable personality disorder or seasonal affective disorder. Our terror of emptiness may be part of the reason we keep busy and can never complete tasks, keep finding ourselves in conflict in our relationships, and feel down.
We may also seek to fill the void with something that looks positive on the outside, such as starting a charity to help others or cooking a meal for a friend, even having a child (or writing A bi-weekly column for The Guardian). Unfortunately, none of this actually fills the void; Quite the opposite. Escaping from that makes the void more terrifying, like the monsters that haunt us in our dreams.
What can help is realizing that denying this feeling is making things worse—not just for ourselves, but for our loved ones as well. We may then realize that there is an alternative: tolerating the feeling, turning toward it and trying to understand it.
Even though we are stuck on the hamster wheel of trying to get away from feeling empty, we can’t stop and realize that we actually have the capacity to endure it. When we jump off that wheel, we can discover that feeling is survivable. We can then take a breath, realize that the monster of our dreams may not be as scary as it seems and begin to nurture interest and curiosity in what we have been refusing to look at. This is our chance to discover that the void may not be as empty as we assume.
There may be all kinds of feelings there. Unwanted feelings that are deflated – We are deflated when we empty our bank account to buy another pair of shoes, or as we filter blemishes in photos to arouse envy in others that we cannot bear to feel ourselves, or as we make the children responsible for taking care of our insecurities. Unwanted feelings of pain, infiltration, abandonment, exclusion, terror, anger, self-loathing – and terrible, terrible sadness.
It may seem as if I’m condemning you to escape. I’m not. I believe it is the most understandable, human, instinctive reaction to loss and trauma. I also realize that if we continue to do this, we will pay a very high price. And that after an instinctive reaction, it may be possible to allow space for a more reflective response. Turning toward and feeling these feelings, letting them into our conscious minds and giving them a voice—this is how we can work toward a more solid sense of ourselves. It’s a powerful and profound transformation, from emptying yourself to understanding why you sometimes feel empty.
This is the difference between desperately running away from yourself and going on an energizing race. Between using your child to work through difficult feelings and developing the ability to help your child process them. Between starting a charity because you’re trying to undo your own pain and burning, and instead, commemorate your loss and through the process develop the courage to stand with others in their grief.
It’s the difference between building a life that looks better to others on Instagram and building a life that feels more meaningful to you.
