The Emptiness

He was a simple man intellectually. A dreamer. A bit artistic.

I was a complex person, with many sides and facets and nothing about me was as it seemed.

But both of us were romantics. I could create dozens of stories in my head and he could watch stories all day and all night. We were actors and thus we could create fantasy out of anything.

I was his Sheherzade. I captured his heart with my stories, my craziness and my imagination. I knew he loved me. But I?

‘You never loved him,’ a friend whispered after the divorce. Not loving him didn’t mean I wasn’t broken. I was broken. Amputated. Snapped in two. Disconnected. Not myself.

But it is true, I never loved him. The man I loved never existed. Who I loved was a hero in a bollywood romance. Salman Khan playing one of his devoted lover roles. But I wasn’t the kind of girl he chased in the movies—a domestic doe. I was the kind of girl who runs away from marriage and family.

I was a girl who didn’t belong with her society. I was a girl going through the motions of normal life.

I did all the socially expected and desirable things, yet through it all, through the exciting bits, love letters, presents and kisses, the degrees, jobs and pregnancy, my heart was empty. My heart belonged elsewhere….it flew with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, it cried with Ghalib, it wrote with Parveen Shakir, it danced with Meera who was so in love with Krishna, she forgot to be a wife.

Later, when all my various attempts to find happiness in the world of men and things had failed, Buddha’s smile came into my life. My closest friends and exes brought him to me. A bowl. A book on Zen. Allan Watts. Buddha statues. A Buddha picture. I think deep down anyone who has loved me has known that my true love isn’t them. Every time someone transgresses the invisible wall, I feel so suffocated that I will do anything to find my inner space again.

After my marriage ended, I felt like someone had ripped out my heart and its place there was a constant aching emptiness, in time the aching left, but the emptiness never did. It is my truest companion. It was the gift he gave me. So, when someone comes along validating me, praising me and wanting to spend time with me, it feels wrong. Just plain wrong. Anybody who has been through an abusive relationship can probably relate. That part that’s broken can’t feel anything except self loathing.

All phenomena is empty, devoid of substance, Buddha said. It was true, but I needed to know that for myself before I sat down on the meditation cushion, exhausted from chasing happiness in form.

Nothing I achieved fulfilled me.

Nobody’s love filled the emptiness inside.

My literary companions’ words were the only solace in my life and then there was Buddha.

The truth was that I had been living someone else’s life. A conditioned life. A normal life because it was safe to be normal. A life based on the exteriority of me. That life had nothing to do with me.

I lived the life of my parent’s child. I lived the life of my husband’s cute wife. I lived the life of my employer’s reliable employee. I was my best friend’s eccentric friend. I don’t think I was actually me until the time I started to meditate and connect to that part of me that was the real me.

But the real me wasn’t loveable. I wasn’t cute. I wasn’t funny. I was a pain body that had not learnt as yet how to stop hurting. Very few would want to love this emptiness. But I learnt to love her, bit by bit. I let her, the real me, enter my life. First with baby steps, then bolder, I stood up and became the authentic me. It was a slow love affair, I took my time. The causes for depression can be very complex and span generations and each step that leads to freedom can be herculean. I accepted my face. I accepted my hair. I accepted my body. I accepted that my body changes.

The other day, when I did something goofy, and the most interesting man in my life laughed spontaneously from his heart, my heart stopped. My body trembled. I knew it had gone on too long. I had to run before he saw the emptiness behind the smile. I don’t know what he would do. Whether he’d run or bring me closer. All I knew is that my emptiness wasn’t as empty as I need it to be to be emotionally safe.

Self-help is full of good advice. Learn to love again. Let go of the ex. Let go of the pain. Go with the flow. Self-help gives trashy advice. It is cliched. It is a $19.99 lie. Somebody’s making a living from telling how you ‘should be’. It doesn’t work. It makes people guilty about not being cool or happy.

Here’s the truth. If you’ve been hurt in the past, chances are you will get hurt again. If you’ve broken up over an issue, chances are you will go through that again. The only thing that can change is how you conduct yourself when it happens. We are trapped in karmic cycles that are near impossible to break without serious effort and coaching. The things that changed for me during the healing journey were very small. My victories were so tiny. The next time someone tried to force himself on me, I was able to kick him in the crotch.

The next time someone wanted to marry me so he could move into my house, I broke it off.

The next time a married man came on strong, I was able to freeze him with one look.

And finally, the next time, there was no next time, but only a deep sense of now.
But all this came about because of the emptiness. The emptiness is my source of strength. It is my vaccination, from the disease of wishing things were different.