A Hollow 2022 Recap

It’s been a year that I won’t really be able to calculate without time.

Over the last several years, I began to experience great anxiety and depression at a level I hadn’t before. From my time ending with Hands of Hope Africa to a bunch of chaos with the Blazers ending with me being fired to the end of multiple relationships that I held dear.

But something happened at the end of all of that loss. 

I woke up one morning and realized I was no longer anxious.

All of my anxiety had passed with losing all the things I had cared for so deeply and preciously in my life.

The anxiety had been replaced with… nothing.  Or nonethingness I should say.

I was hollow.

I remember waking up on November 19, 2022 and staring at my wall, “Is this what death feels like?”  I had no feeling, no hope, not even any anxiety, I was simply hollow.

Journal Entry, November 19, 2022

Not thrilled with my life.  Not satisfied.  Not happy.

  Alive.

  Not thriving.

  Surviving.  But am I?

  Sometimes I wake up & feel like death.  Hollow. 

I keep showing up.  I’m proud of myself for being alive.  For waking up…

If God won’t be there for me, I will.

  Hopelessness, grief, pain.

  Unrelenting.

  Hollow, hollow.

  Hollow.

If I felt anything, it was darkness. A darkness hovering around and in me. I felt God to be very cruel, compounding loss upon loss. 

Life became more survival, day-by-day or as my therapist put it, ‘take things even minute-by-minute’ if you have to. 

I’m a dreamer, visionary, goal-setter so this survival day-by-day has been different for me. But it’s the space I’m in.  The empty pages in my book.  Waiting for some kind of meaning or purpose. Can it be the next chapter yet?

Life

it came

So cruel

It lied

For hope

I lost

The day

It died

For what

Is next

To hope

This life

Is there

Joy

That I can

Find  

*

I guess I’m looking forward to 2023. Because, why not?

But regardless of me, one thing I know, I’ll be rooting for you. 

***

Addendum:

I planned on ending on a bit of a sour note, because, well, life has been a bit sour. 

I don’t mind being honest about sadness or sourness, it is what it is.  But… the thing is, it’s in the expression of that, that I do find meaning and purpose.  And in the last month, life has become a bit sweeter, finding some of that life and meaning again.  And even when I don’t, finding the will within myself to keep fighting, keep searching, keep breathing. 

“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the ‘divine madness,’ to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”
​— Rollo May (via Cody Swift and Riverstyx Foundation)