nothing to prove

how will you fill the void?

Hélène Delmaire for Portrait of a Lady on Fire

On Wednesday J and I walked through an old neighborhood and talked about how having something to prove is pretty big driver of intensity and focus. What did J call it? An attempt to fill the void.

What is the void?

Paraphrasing Blaise Pascal: there’s a vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. An infinite abyss. He theorized the concept of the god-shaped hole. The belief that every human yearns for something transcendent.

I do believe we search our whole lives for something to fill a vacuum, an innate craving within us. But in a more secular sense, that most of us have a void of worthiness we try to fill. We long for validation. Want to prove we’re attractive, diligent, successful. We look for it in every project, in every lover, in every city. Our whole lives spin around its axis.

It’s a pretty common phenomenon to want very badly to prove something to other people. Cynics. Disbelievers. People who judged us to be mediocre. We constantly want to prove them wrong. We want to show them how we’ve changed. How mutable, flexible, we are. That we aren’t held captive to old versions of ourselves. That we can change, grow, become proficient, more competent.

Everything goes back to wanting to feel valued I guess. For a long time, all of my energy went toward piling shiny things up to try and prove my worth. I tried to fill the void with prestigious titles and brunches and credit card points. I wanted to be a cool, perfect girl: balanced and not extreme, intellectually competent and socially adept. Only recently have I realized how externally validating but internally hollow these outcomes really were.

What was I trying to prove? That I was smart and lovable I guess.

But nothing I was doing was a function of love. Everything existed to distract me, seduce me, and maybe convince me to consume more things I didn’t need.

The hardest and possibly most wonderful part of life is figuring out how to fill the void. Filling it with the right things.

Turning that relentless obsession projected outwards into the world and focusing it inward. Into proficiency, fluency, mastery.

What’s difficult is there are endless things that beg to be done, but only you can know which things feel right — no one else can tell you what they are.

I ask myself often: when I think of all my possible lives, what truly resonates? Which is the life I actually want rather than the life that is the most “valuable” or proves I’m doing the most?

Is it the cushy freelance writer-life in Park Slope? A slow existence in an Asian suburb with 2 kids and a small dog? Thriving in my corporate girl era in the center of Manhattan, or hiking every national park in America?

Now I realize what I’m looking for is not a place. It’s not fantasy. It’s simply a feeling I can inhabit. Internal validation. Knowing I could go anywhere with that feeling and still be okay, still be loved, still be safe. Fulfillment? Purpose? Deeply rooted interest? I can’t even articulate what exactly it feels like. But I take heart in knowing I’m moving towards it.

I keep writing because it’s my gateway to full expression and freedom. A refusal to be defined or limited. It somehow feels truer, larger, realer than me. My form of devotion. A small but significant form of aliveness against entropy.

I still believe fully that human wisdom and deep satisfaction comes from truly giving up on being defined by others. But it’s still so hard, isn’t it?

These days I don’t think my void is filled by a huge theater of applause or a shiny new invention. Maybe my center of meaning is made by small, intimate, lovingly created things. I’m anchored by something profoundly human. And I’m simply meant to be a good channel for ideas that make the world a softer, more self accepting, more loving place.

Finding something to fill the void is my life’s work. Maybe I’ll always be looking. Yet I try to remind myself regularly of this beautiful, comforting truth: the only person I need to prove anything to is me.

-N.

PS: you might also like my essays, gut feelings or lukewarm feelings. Which are also about leaning into truer expressions/the feeling of things being right for you.

Quote of the Week

Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off.

Haruki Murakami

French Song of the Week