Holes. And also .gifs.

I've been thinking about holes. Not the kind you dig, but the kind that are dug into you. And I've been thinking about the things with which we fill those holes.



Before you facepalm and click away, no, that is not a euphemism. I mean, yes, it very easily could be, but I don't mean it in that sense – or, at least, not exclusively in that sense.


People are filled up with holes. Whatever fragile fabric makes our souls is riddled with gaps, some of which we rend ourselves, but many of which, I think, are created by others, by society, by forgotten dreams and unfulfilled expectations.


I spent almost a month back home this summer, and since I've been back in my apartment, I've spent a disproportionate amount of my time hugging my cats and feeling despondent and massively lonely. Part of that is that my parents are my best friends, and being two thousand miles away from them is really hard. Part of it is that living in a house with others is a very different thing from living alone, and readjusting is painful as always.


But being lonely made me think about being lonely, and how many of us are lonely so much of the time. Even when we're around other people, even when we're laughing and sharing with friends, we seem to be battling this crippling isolationism.

I think romantic isolation is one of the primary ways people in our age group are made to feel inadequate. We are conditioned all our lives to believe that once we reach our mid-twenties, we're supposed to be involved in a stable relationship that will, in all – however unspoken – likelihood, lead to marriage. Just like we're conditioned to believe in one standard of beauty, and one kind of traits to find attractive, we're conditioned to believe that we are incomplete and in general less than if we are not romantically involved.




We feel lonely, too, because we are constantly comparing ourselves to everyone around us. Having spent the last two and a half months unemployed and acutely aware of that fact, I learned precisely how degrading it can feel to be out of work, despite having a degree and a passably decent skill set. The inadequacy can be overwhelming; it attacks you in your very soul, to the point where you are tired in your bones and the color starts to bleed out of the world with every new rejection.


We feel lonely despite being massively interconnected. The fact that I can text any of fifty different people right now, or am on Tumblr with thousands, or have Facebook open on another tab, where I am hooked to 200+ "friends," does not alleviate the fact that my house feels dreadfully empty. The astonishing myriad webs between us all does not fill the holes inside our spirits: They just fool us into thinking we are full.


But none of those things are true. Not really. The moments that restore us, in my experience, do not come from screens or sex or substances. They come from moments where we are known. Really known, and recognized not as someone we present to the world, but as really what we are, flaws and foibles included.

Sometimes, the holes inside us are raw and jagged, and they pester, and they stress, and they pick at us. But we cannot fill an emptiness with empty things. It makes sense that in a society that rejects us for the slightest transgression, we would be frightened of rejection and therefore play the judge in our own exiles. Perhaps bred within us all is a fear of the truth, a fear of being rendered naked and having our imperfect minds and bodies bared to another living soul.






My dad had this saying when I was growing up, about how relationships work. I'm doubtful as to whether he said it first, or was quoting some half-remembered source, but he said, "Seek first to know, then to be known." He said that was the key to not just his marriage, but all successful relationships between humans.


Long before my dad and I ever spoke about relationships, Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know...the human race lives also by art and reasonings. And from memory experience is produced in men; for many memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. Experience seems to be very similar to science and art, but really science and art come to men through experience; for 'experience made art,' as Polus says, 'but inexperience luck.' And art raises, And art arises, when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgement about similar objects is produced."


Aristotle continues to talk about how we generally consider great artists to be overall wiser than average people, because they understand not just things, but also the causes and purposes of things. Aristotle suggests that it's not their understandings we are admiring, but their experiences, because art is created by artists' representations of shared human experiences.


Experiences like loneliness. I can't think of one great artist, author or musician who created something brilliant out of a wellspring of joy. Typically, we are driven to inspiration and creation by trials and pain, by tears we cannot begin to understand. I think it's one of the most beautiful things about being human: that we are capable of transforming pain and tribulation into masterpiece. That a feeling as useless and bitter as isolation can make "Starry Night" or Wuthering Heights or all of Warren Zevon's discography is truly a remarkable thing.


Art moves us because it reminds us that we are not alone. The things we feel have been felt before; are still felt, all around us, constantly, perpetually, because we all feel somehow lonely and unrecognized. The isolation that both cripples and shelters us, the things that make us feel different and alone, are also the things that bind us all together and make us the same.


A wise friend once told me, "People are just people." Everyone has the same types of holes bored into them: holes of inadequacy, holes of fear, holes of obligation, holes of expectation, holes of isolation. And we all try to fill them with the same things: drink, sex, work, sleep.


I don't think the holes go away. Maybe we work hard, maybe we share an evening with someone who really gets us, maybe we pray, maybe we read or see something that reaches deep inside and pieces back together something that was broken, maybe we find real, ageless love, and maybe that fixes us in some way – and maybe then we trip into a new hole we hadn't registered before. I think part of being human is being full of holes, because if we weren't, nothing would ever grab us from the inside and stir everything up, and there would be no art or music or philosophy, because it is the tension between the way things are and the way we think they should be that shapes the world we live in.


-A