7. ‘Sometimes, my brain empties out…’

Bright ideas for dark times

Next month I’ll be appearing at the Canterbury Festival where I’ll be talking about ‘Reawakening Wonder’ with Will Skidelsky on Saturday 5 April at 5.30pm. Find tickets and more information here • Find out more about my The Way Through Winter course • Check out my in-person retreat in July • I’m hosting regular ‘silent sits’ as part of my programme of online retreats - an hour of companionable, communal silence for those who would relish some extra contemplative space. These are open to all full members, and there are more details at the bottom of the page.

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Previously on Bright Ideas for Dark Times:

4. Tend to your nervous system

5. Thoughts and prayers

6. On extraction

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We spend a lot of time talking about the times when our heads are full, and how to deal with them: stress, overwhelm, burnout; the sheer busy-ness of everyday life. But for me, there’s a counterpoint to that feeling, a sense that, sometimes, my brain empties out.

At those times, I tend to struggle to know what I feel. If pressed, I’d maybe say grumpy, or just quiet. It’s not a lovely, soothing kind of quiet, but an absence, a void. It’s a feeling of not wanting to feel anymore, of everything being too much. The doors have closed on my mind, and are sealed shut. Nothing else can be admitted.

The two are clearly related, the overwhelm and the emptiness. One comes after the other. The emptiness is a way of saying no more. It’s also a feeling of aftermath, and experience of overwhelm receding. This is the space that’s left when the constant need to rush and respond has subsided, the panic no longer present. A new normality. All of those things have made a space for themselves, and now it’s sitting vacant, an empty cavern.

When my brain has emptied out (Illustration: Complot)

For me, it often feels as though my words have escaped. I have absolutely nothing to say, which is - as you can probably guess - unusual for me. Although I often think that being a writer makes it hard to express the most simple sentiment anyway. You should see me trying to write an email - it takes hours of agonising over the choice of words, and even then there will be multiple typos. Maybe words are just hard work in the first place.

But I digress. The truth is, everything is hard. I have yet to speak to a single person who hasn’t found the beginning of this year a bit of a monster. It’s tempting to think that something has gone cosmically wrong (as a friend said recently, there’s always someone who will pop up and tell you that Mercury is in retrograde, even when it isn’t; it’s a handy shorthand for ‘WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?’). Feeling empty is a sign of needing a break, or at least - breaks being not always forthcoming - a change. As Julia Cameron says, sometimes you need to ‘fill your well’. There are a lot of wells running dry right now.

Here are some bright ideas for when you’re feeling empty: