Void Girl

on death, emptiness, turning towards grief, and healing through art.

I remember the day it happened.

I turned towards the void I had been running from.

Lying in the grass under a tree in a park that rose high above the city. The same place my dad and I would lie when I was small.

Tears fell from the corners of my eyes as the sky opened up and the ground began to take me.

An empty hole in my core prying for my attention, aching, and hollowing me.

It was the same hole that formed when I was a young girl and I felt the inner splitting.

A cutting off from my reality, from my self, and leaving of my body, and entering a darkness darker that the blackest night.

The now, here, in the park, I let it swallow me.

Just in the way it had, years ago when I realized… he’d never wear that hat again. Traces of his smell lingering in my nose. The image of dust.. slipping though my fingers.

I remembered lying in the hammock with him, looking into the infinite night sky, talking about spaceships, ET’s, and ghosts. I was always fascinated by what could be possible. I remembered his laughter, his joy playing frisbee at the park with me. I missed him more than my heart could hold.

I always knew one of my parents would die when I was very young. I knew years before it happened. My childhood filled with funerals and grieving adults. As all of my grandparents passed before my eyes. When he passed away it really hit home. It wasn’t just he had that passed away, but it was that he decided to leave, that broke me.

I knew one parent had to go, I would cry instantaneously when thinking of either parent. One night, awake, when I was about seven or eight. A part of me, or a part of it.. god, universe, source, asked me. Which one could you bare? You have to choose.

I knew intuitively my father was a bit more unstable than my mother, I chose my dad, and about five years later, I stared at his lifeless shell on a steal slab.

Death, was always something knocking at my door, etching it’s imprint into my skin.

When I was very young my mother sought a guru to give me a spiritual name Alkalcar- Ah-call-car; conquerer of death and time, was what was chosen for me.

Death kept me always half in and half out. The silent hum of don’t get too attached you will lose this soon.

It also always kept me very alive, romanticizing my every connection with a lover and wondering who would they be, how long will be, and also oddly slightly disassociated.

Not understanding my impact of always preemptively preparing for loss at any moment. I always had a back up so I would never have to face the grieve of being alone, of being with loss, of being with the void.

Walking on the bridge that was constantly breaking underneath me, on to the next thing before my current foundation cracked.

This wasn’t the first time I entered the void fully. I had become acquainted for quite some time dipping my toes in here and there when I ran away to California to find myself and face it.

However, the story I told myself was not the reality, really a move across states to the exciting land of endless sunlight was my way distract my self from fully entering it.

This time was different, I had been caught in an abuse cycle for about six years. Staying still in contact with him when I ran away, I had never fully cut the cord, until now. Previously running from person to person ever since my father passed. This time I had left him, entirely, and with nothing, and no one to distract me.

Grief was thick this day, my limbs felt like cinder blocks, I was exhausted, no hunger, just empty.

Nothing can reach me here, no exercise, no self help hack, no meditation, no fix.

It’s like a tsunami of all the pain I refused to feel in my entire life.

Flashes of my ex’s empty eyes staring, the sound of him yelling and slamming the table with his fist, the smell of alcohol, the fear constricting my muscles, the feeling that I failed him, and then that the systems of care failed him, failed my sister, and failed my dad.

Would I become like them?

Quickly the grief turned from personal to global.

Feeling now just below my sternum the pain of the entire world. The wars, the racism, sexism, ablism, and the machine of extraction that discards anyone who doesn’t actively feed it.

Those who have been cast out and made insane for not being able to cope with the atrocities. The roots of addiction and suicide.

The pain of hatred and disconnection.

I felt the cracking of the earth crumbling underneath me, I stared into the branches above me and the leaves swaying gently in the hot dry air.

Its not just my pain, it’s our pain it’s the pain of humanity and theres nothing I can do about it.

I felt the avalanche crush me, the waves toss my under, the winds engulf me entirely.

I wish I could say this moment was cathartic, that I got up from the grassy spot renewed and full of life, ready to face the adversity and fight against injustice, against systems that break people.

Grief doesn’t work like that.

When my tears finally dried, instead, I just felt empty, lifeless, and dead.

I wandered through my days the following weeks deliriously despaired. Numb, and dissociated, a part of me coming back to life here and there, but the void was always waiting, lurking in the backdrop of every moment, and grieving making swipes at me suddenly without time to prepare.

It was that day that it dawned on me. Maybe I don’t have to heal entirely alone.

I explored Craniosacral and Reiki as a means to heal this void with a colleague of mine in the same field. The sessions did not remove it, but they were profoundly healing in the sense that I did begin to build capacity and space in being able to enter it. I would feel relief for a few days, but there was never a point in time I could “rid” myself of it.

Finding people that didn’t rush me into getting beyond it were key for me.

I used running as a means to transmute the emptiness, but as fate may have it, I was also running on empty, letting my eating disorder once again sink it’s teeth into me.

As winter came that year, my body began to signal me with aliments to keep me connected to it, nerve pain, headaches, and chronic fatigue that lasted months.

I had to stop running, and spend a lot of time just laying down, surrendering to it. This is what healing looks like.

Void can take the form of nihilism, this is what I felt reverberate though me that day on the grass; that everything is meaningless.

And that can turn into a state where the void devours you, it eats you alive when we let our hardships break us down.

Yet theres a fine line tight rope one can walk of allowing the void to instead break you open. We get to choose.

Without our hearts breaking in grief, we never really realize how deeply we love.

Maybe if there is no meaning, we can find a spaciousness where we get to create the meaning.

In that empty space -anything can come of it. We create our meaning, and can’t that be enough? It’s only through spaciousness we can create form; Sunyata.

Void beyond blackness- is possibility. From death, births new life.

Maybe a part of me was finding this, there in the grass, inside the emptiness, I was being reborn.

About a year past, of me feeling and finding myself in the void.

I no longer looked for another person to fill me, I instead sought embodiment of and expression of every state inside myself. Recognizing if the right person where to come along, they could hold this awareness too.

After a shitty and strange dating experience in late July about a year after the Void experience, in the dead of summer, I found myself back in the blackness.

Yet these feelings I have learned are cyclic. Terrence Mckenna said. “Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.”

Under that apathy—> anger— >grief—> love.

Stuck in what felt like a free fall of emptiness by strange synchronicity and circumstances I stumbled upon a really cool online community for artists. The whole premise was that art can save the world from falling asleep.

Art can be alchemy to wake you up and make you feel again.

It was then I saw void girl in my minds eye. I was deeply inspired, I had not painted like this for years, I had resulted to landscape paintings that were more likely to be wall art.

This painting is not for sale.

The numbness melted as my tears spilled spreading paint across the canvas, just painting her breathed life back into my lungs. Nothing to improve, or fix, just expression. Painting her allowed me to both feel the emptiness and fill it.

The day I finished her, I debated posting it to Instagram, I did anyways then I went on a walk to the park, instantly I ran into a colleague of mine whom we had traded healing work with Craniosacral.

He knew the void. He had helped me enter it. He had mentioned he saw the painting online an hour prior, embarrassed that I had yet arrived at a fixed state of healing I chuckled and said “yes I am back in it again.”

He gazed at me openly and honestly not needing me to be anywhere different than I was. “You have to go deep into those chambers of yourself where you’ve kept those pieces exiled pieces locked away, open the cage and love them.”

Its okay to not be okay.

Tears welled and a lightness filled my heart. I felt seen in my emptiness.

---

A month later, we began dating,

A year later, he proposed.

I still cry and the thought of losing him to the void, which will one day happen, he never gets tired of it and hold me every time.

The void still lives inside me, grief plagues me, there is still so much unresolved. I am still recovering from the abuse with my ex. Death still haunts me.

And I am finding my way, more and more, to love those exiled parts, to move in an out of emptiness and fulfillment, to expand and contract.

I do believe the more we build capacity to endure our own darkness, the more we can create the light.

Void girl lives on the wall next to our bed.

Thank you for reading

-Olivia.