Steps to Accomplish The Hollow

It’s that ache in pit of your stomach. The insatiable hunger in the deep recesses of your being. What am I looking for? Why is it taking so long to find? Sometimes the weight of not knowing and not finding “it” sits heavy on my chest and I struggle to breathe. Make the sadness go away. It’s torture to cope – and no one wants to listen. It’s the same piddly, existential crisis on a daily basis. I call it the hollow. That emptiness that you experience when you can’t decide, can’t sit still, can’t find contentment.

Flip the page, find something that impassions. Reinvent yourself and your life to surround that thing. Reinventing is fun, then you get to start over. Realize the passion fades and you’re left with mild disinterest. Lose faith that what you’re doing will ever make you happy, reinvent life again. Stop. Struggle. Repeat.

Let tears fall down your face when the weight crushes your lungs. Ask spouse why you can’t find something that you’re good at, or that contributes to society. Ask spouse why they don’t know who you are, when you don’t even know yourself. Look in the mirror, find your struggle silly and feel bad about yourself.

Lack inspiration for the one thing that makes you feel better, writing. Settle for writing about the persistent internal turmoil you experience on a daily basis. Consider changing blog name to ramblings and musing of someone very unimportant. It’s all very mundane and average.

Last step: feel so entitled that you struggle to settle for anything less than pure fucking ecstasy on a day to day basis. Feel bad that you’re perpetuating an entitled generation.

Resign to hibernating and not interacting with the world.

Untranslatable Word – Toska

A Russian word found to have no English equivalent described by Vladimir Nabokov. I don’t think there is anything quite close to describing the anguish of restlessness and struggling with our own innate human-ness. This word brings me warmth knowing there is someone out there, who understands.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”