The God-Shaped Hole Inside Me

There’s a

god

shaped

hole

inside me.

It’s always been there

I think.

I was three when I first saw it.

I lay in the dirt

and knew

I would

never

ever

ever

be enough.

That there would be a hole inside me

a gaping void

yawning with its sadness.

I was sixteen when someone else saw it.

“When I look in your eyes,”

she said

“I see joy and colour

and it spirals in

and at the end of the spiral

there is sadness.”

Sometimes,

it has overtaken me.

I was 17

when the grey clouds hemmed in my horizons

and stayed

for too long.

I was 27

when I had my first daughter and fell

into a chasm of anxiety

rigid with the adrenaline that thrummed through my veins

viciously whispering

you are not safe you are not safe you are not safe.

Each time,

medication

and

counselling

and

time

and the changing of the things that were hurting

helped.

But still it is there.

The God shaped hole.

Or, as Hiro would call it:

the space when you are not connected with your own soul.

Your own soul. God.

The same thing.

*

A short list of things I do when I’m searching for God/my own soul in all the wrong places:

– eat

– internet internet internet

– want someone else to fill the empty spaces in me.

*

A (much) shorter list of things I could do instead + have more success:

– wait for myself. In a field. Run towards her when she comes.

That, however, will not happen.

In the meantime, I could:

– write

– be gentle

– forgive myself

– make art

– treat self care as a holy practice to commune with the divine

– invite + incite wholehearted truthtelling

– fuck it all up + forget it again + keep forgetting and fucking it up for a long time yet until I do remember (probably the most likely of all these things. And something I hope I can forgive myself for, because that’s probably the whole point of everything in this whole human life thing).

*

And the words are trite.

And the action plans won’t control anything.

But the truth-telling, I have learned,

holds its own kind of balm.

So I tell you, I offer it up:

[bctt tweet=”There’s a God-shaped hole inside me. And I don’t always know how to fill it up.”]

 

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