The Eternal Quest For Emptiness

Why I still reach for the poison when the cure is within reach

74 half-finished drafts waiting for completion. Even more fragments of stories waiting to be threaded into their true purpose, or anything at all. I don’t know if this is a lot or comparatively little, it doesn’t matter. I can’t concentrate. My mind is scurrying between tasks and stories and levels of thought of equal magnitude like a sad puppy on coke. Lost, looking for home.

I ate two bags of chips. They were small bags of chips, but I was watching a movie while I ate. And food is information is food is information: I’m full, I can’t think, I can’t do.

It’s all the same, it doesn’t matter what it is: the more I take in, the more gets stuck in the in-between, waiting for release, the more my brain fries itself into a hapless pile of stale protein, the less it is capable of opening even the tiniest window through which to dispense the thoroughly remixed foods and thoughts and everything into anything resembling a cohesive, structured… whatsitcalled.

When I was eighteen, I went for a run every other day.

I ran with Mozart (the playlist from the book Ma vie avec Mozart) which I had found, curiously, to be the only sound, no matter what tempo and rhythm, that enabled me to breathe fully and easily while exerting my body like this.

Mozart pulled a special kind of purity into the world. Not a frill too many, not a note out of place in his melodies. The embodiment of heaven, timeless and weightless. So perfect, my body sang with him. When Mozart was on my ears, I was free.

Soon after I began running — I thought I should do thirty minutes every other day — I realized my runs weren’t truly satisfying me anymore. I needed them longer, more strenuous, and I imagined myself giddily almost passing out after a completed, victorious hour.

I added a sprint towards the end. This was glorious, until it, too, after a few weeks, failed to deliver the emptiness I sought.

I added another lap around the pond. It wasn’t enough.

Two laps.

After a couple of months, I stopped running. I would be moving from my hometown to Berlin soon for art school, and I was deep in boy troubles.

The quest for emptiness morphed and triangulated into different pursuits, and my body went with it.

The same year, shortly prior to the running, I fasted for a month straight.

I needed to feel empty. I was desperate.

Desperation always began, then manifested in, total disconnection from and hatred of my body.

My mind was always the real mean girl. She looked at my body, the innocent one, and ruled this wasn’t the way a body should be. She spouted profanity at it every day, all day, all year, for years.

The fact was, though, I’m somewhat sure now — my body was always too full for my mind to go anywhere else. She hadn’t been exposed to the radical idea that it may not be about eating less per se, it could just be about consuming less of life in general.

Less people. Less sounds. Less media, fewer projects, fewer words, fewer ingredients, fewer passions. Fewer songs — by God, shuffle, you say? One on repeat is plenty.

Sometimes, I wished I had an eating disorder. But I always narrated myself out of them when the thoughts arose, just as I could never fully “commit” to suicidal ideation; my mind was too quick to dismiss it, making myself, ironically, even smaller through this — thank God — inability to be drowned in something so completely I wouldn’t be able to think myself out of it.

I always thought of myself as an all-or-nothing person. But “nothing” never stuck, so it was always “all”: all the pasta. All the creative pursuits. All the instruments, all the orchestras and chamber music and solo projects. All the subjects in school, all the books. All the artistic mediums. The one thing I never considered was writing.

How supremely ironic that this is the one that requires almost nothing at all. My butt on a chair, my hands on a pen. So easy.

But it was this simplicity that I had to work and experience and fail and crash into by accident, via necessity, or I never would have been able to see it like I do now.

Writing is the purest act of emptying out. How chilling the notion that this, the most minimal of creative pursuits — translating the immaterial into forms in space, making something out of nothing — is the one that demands so much overall emptiness preceding the emptying?

I was skeptical for a while of writers claiming the concept of being “blocked” for themselves. When I used to paint and draw and play the viola, I had visceral, even physically painful reactions to needing to paint and or practice viola. More often than not, I found I simply could not when I attempted to do anything. Now, I think episodes of artistic paralysis were largely owed to my perfectionism, my undiagnosed autism, and the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be doing these things anyway.

But today I’m thinking about emptiness, and it does seem that precisely this, this vast, tiny space of gigantic nothingness is the largest hurdle to overcome when we try to think ourselves into creating.

In painting, in music, in acting, there are materials, colors, instruments, people: matter. Matter distracts you from your inner voice and gives you an entry point to creation. You begin, and, provided you let yourself, you do.

In writing, there is only you — and the entire universe within.

One year ago, I began an experiment. I had learned about Human Design some time ago, and this interesting system that feels more like science than any other New-Age-y philosophy quickly became a major obsession.

At some point, I found out that my digestive system, per my shockingly layered body graph, is the most primitive of them all. Dating back to caveman times, when the only food and information humans consumed were those directly in front of them, “Consecutive Appetite” people’s brains only work as they should when they are given one ingredient at a time. Hunters eat their fill when they have it. There is no variety. No cooking — if any, a roast over the fire. Eating everything there is until nothing is left, then waiting until the next thing appears, or is killed through great physical effort.

At first, I was deeply annoyed by this information. I’m a trained chef, for fuck’s sake, and these fuckers were trying to tell me there would be no more cooking for me? No more pasta, no sushi, no pastries and ice cream and all the amazing things I have been obsessed with most of my life?

What a strange way to prescribe eating habits.

So I ignored it. But my thoughts percolated around this new idea.

I caved.

My stomach rejoiced. A new kind of hunger emerged. A joyous yes! from somewhere deep within. Three apples in a row? Mmmm-hm. The entire salad spinner full of lamb’s lettuce? Oh, my. Half a pot of plain, cooked carrots? My goodness, my body craved these foods like nothing else before, and it was satisfied so much sooner every time, so completely, in a way the fullest of stomachs never did.

When I let myself ponder it, memories surfaced: Eating all the peas out of the pasta salad. Then, the corn, afterward the pickles, and at last — finally — only the pasta. One thing at a time. It had always felt weird and unsatisfying to eat these chaotic foods. I didn’t know why, of course. I just didn’t like the “bits”. I abhor ice cream with mix-ins. Everything that has discernible parts, I always thought, would be strangely bettered if its admittedly delicious extras were stripped away, the dish pared down to its most basic form.

Classic three-component dishes were always eaten in order, not at once. When plain lettuce, no dressing, was available and lying on the counter, I would devour it. It was too good.

I remembered gorging myself on buffets. Fearing I would burst. Worrying about my eating habits — at age eight. Why could I never stop?

In this new context, I mused that my body wasn’t getting enough of one-thing-at-a-time, so it was doing the next best thing, intelligently, stupidly, squeezing in so much of everything that perhaps, enough of one may come together in the end.

Since I began allowing myself the occasional indulgence of eating only one ingredient — broccoli, carrots, potatoes are the easiest and most satisfying picks — until I’m full, my life has, in ways, become messier. In large spurts, things are coming to the surface. So many memories, emotions, fear, anxiety, all the things I stuffed down my memory hole, down, deeper, for all those years, are coming up for air.

I’ve tried to follow this protocol strictly. Every time a new bout of needing to empty myself hit since last year. But it didn’t go well — too much, too soon, the rate at which my body purged was overwhelming and detrimental to my day-to-day, and at long last, I learned to pace myself.

This almost manic urgency for immediate physical catharsis has been present many years now. Every two to three months, I feel an overwhelming urge to stop eating altogether, to literally trim the fat. Not for body image reasons — purely to rid myself of the feeling of having been stretched too far in every possible way.

Remember I said I fasted for a month? I did that twice. Yes, it was stupid. Yes, it was quite unhealthy, especially considering how drenched my thoughts were with the simple notion of food for thirty days straight. (Interestingly, both times I did this, the one thing I lusted for most was barely-cooked, dripping steak. Talk about hunter preferences. I don’t have this urge when I eat like everyone else on the planet, I even feel better leaning towards veganism.) As I said, I was desperate. I had an overwhelming need to feel empty.

It wasn’t a literal emptiness my body was calling out for, it was just… less. A lot less. I simply never knew what that entailed.

But the poison has its place. It’s what led me here. Had I not loved eating, had I not pursued the act of preparing foods with such tenacity and devotion — I would not have applied for that apprenticeship, I would not have met the father of my child, I would not have gone through the most torturous year of my life with him, I would not have even begun searching for answers with the fervor that led me to the beginning of my healing.

Like methadone for heroin addicts (a morbid comparison, I know, but it’s true) eating complex foods and consuming “too much” information — consciously, in moderation, with the occasional splurge — keeps me sane, allowing me to somewhat safely tread that line between straying and staying back where I always was — full to bursting, overwhelmed and paralyzed — and forging too fast into this new place of just-enoughness — leaving me flailing, free-falling, the trash being brought up too quick to sort into its proper containers, overwhelmed in an entirely unfamiliar way.

So I still eat cookies. I still have a bag of chips with my movie. Or two. I still have sauce with the meat I’m slowly incorporating back into my diet. (I make damn delicious gravy.) I still season my scrambled eggs, I sit them on a nice layer of garlicky cream cheese atop my multigrain breakfast roll.

I eat these things, and I let them bring me joy. I let them fuel my body with their goodness, with the prosperity of this modern civilization they epitomize.

And then I’ll have an apple, or two, and I enjoy it just as much. Possibly more.

I do all this, but I don’t force emptiness upon myself anymore. I know this is just the beginning. There are other times and new pastures ahead, and to run to them on an empty stomach would be quite a reckless endeavor.