Reflections from the Empty: Building from Negative Ground
That uncertainty bleeds into every corner of my daily life, turning even the simplest tasks into overwhelming hurdles.
I don’t know what kind of career I want. I have multiple ideas, multiple options, especially once I leave Pocatello—but none of them feel like the thing. None feel like a calling or a clear direction. They’re just possibilities floating in the air, not anchors pulling me forward.
I don’t know where I want to live. I don’t know what city is “home.” I don’t know if I want a house or an apartment, quiet or noise, permanence or movement.
After divorce, that kind of not-knowing hits differently. It’s not the blank slate people romanticize. It’s not exciting or empowering most days. It feels hollow. Like the future used to have a shape, even if imperfect—and now it’s just fog.
What makes it harder is that I keep waiting for some deep inner pull to show up. Some voice that says this way. Some desire that feels undeniable. But it isn’t there. Not about work. Not about place. Not about identity. Not about ambition.
The only thing that still has gravity for me is my spiritual practice. Faith. Ritual. Prayer. The slow, quiet work of staying connected to something larger than my fear. That’s the only place where I still feel rooted, even when everything else feels unmoored.
And that’s what scares me.
I used to know what I wanted—or at least I thought I did. I wanted partnership. I wanted shared life. I wanted a future built with someone else. And when that ended, it didn’t just take a relationship with it. It took the storyline I was living inside.
Now when I ask myself, What do you want? there’s no answer. Just silence. Just exhaustion. Just a vague sense of wanting relief, safety, stability, and meaning—but not knowing what form any of that should take.
One of the worst parts isn’t just uncertainty—it’s the lack of direction. Not just not knowing where I’m going, but not having a past that I can move forward from.
So much of what I thought I was building collapsed. So much of what used to orient me no longer exists. It’s like standing still, not because I refuse to move, but because there’s no visible road ahead and no solid ground behind me to push off from.
If I could find one thing—just one real, viable, meaningful thing—to begin moving toward, that would be enough. I don’t need a full life plan. I don’t need certainty. I just need a direction that feels real enough to take a step into.
But I can’t find it. I reach for it and come back empty-handed every time.
It feels like being stuck in neutral while the engine is running.
People talk about “reinventing yourself” like it’s a choice you make in a single moment. Like you wake up one day and decide who you’re going to be next. But that’s not how it feels from inside this place. Reinvention feels less like creativity and more like standing in the dark, waiting for something—anything—to come into focus.
I keep wondering if the problem is me. If I should want something more clearly by now. If I should have found a new dream, a new identity, a new anchor. But the truth is, the old anchors were torn out violently, not gently set down. And nothing grows in ground that’s still ripped open.
So here I am. Directionless. Not aimless, exactly—because I do care, I do want, I do hope—but without a north star I can actually see.
I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what I’m becoming. I just know that I’m still here, still searching for the first real step forward—still waiting for something to finally feel like movement.
It isn’t just that I don’t know where I’m going. It’s that I don’t have a past anymore that has footing—no solid ground, no weight, no traction. Everything from the last fourteen years of my life suddenly came to mean nothing in the way a past is supposed to mean something. Not memories exactly, but value. Use. Leverage. Momentum.
It’s like none of it carries enough weight to anchor a step forward.
That isn’t a clean slate. A clean slate implies freedom, possibility, room to choose. This feels nothing like that. It feels like standing in midair and being told to start walking. Like trying to build the ground under your own feet while you’re already standing on it—so that you can maybe build the next step. And that feels almost impossible.
Normally, a life moves forward because the past pushes it. Experience becomes fuel. History becomes ballast. Even pain becomes usable. But right now, my history doesn’t offer that. It doesn’t propel me. It doesn’t steady me. It doesn’t argue for me. It just sits there, inert. Heavy in memory, weightless in function.
I’m not grieving a single loss. I’m grieving the loss of continuity—the ability to say, because of what I lived, I can now move forward like this. That sentence doesn’t work anymore. It breaks halfway through.
When everything was said and done, I didn’t just start over. I started below zero.
I had negative dollars. I still do. I didn’t have a place of my own—no apartment, no house, nothing in my name. I stayed with family and friends. I don’t have a car. I own very little, and what I do own has no real financial value. No assets. No cushion. No leverage.
That’s the part people don’t understand when they talk about “starting fresh.”
There was no fruit from my past life to carry forward. No storehouse. No savings. No accumulated stability that should have existed after fourteen years of adulthood, partnership, work, and effort. Regardless of divorce, something should have been there. And it wasn’t.
Without that baseline—without provisions, money, or material footing—there’s nowhere to begin storing anything new. You can’t stock a pantry that doesn’t exist. You can’t build on ground that hasn’t been raised to ground level yet.
Right now, what I need is simple, but it isn’t easy: a job that pays decently and offers some flexibility. By “decent,” I don’t mean luxury. I mean $15 to $18 an hour. Enough to start stabilizing things.
Even that won’t feel like progress at first.
When money finally comes in, it won’t be building anything yet. It will pour straight back out—into debts, overdue needs, basic life requirements. It’s not catching up. It’s filling a pit. Raising the soil just to reach ground level.
That’s what people miss. From the outside, it looks like motion without progress. From the inside, it’s foundational labor—unseen, exhausting, necessary.
It takes money to shore up the ground under you. It takes money to create direction. It takes money to make movement real.
Without money, there is no building. Without building, everything just stays suspended—me included.
This suspension shows up in the smallest ways, where there are a hundred things I need to do—and every single one feels overwhelming. My nervous system treats them all the same: as threats, as burdens, as reasons to shut down before I even begin.
I need to see doctors, the dentist, schedule surgery, renew my driver’s license. These are ordinary life tasks. And yet, each one feels enormous. Heavy. Draining. Like climbing a wall with no handholds, where every inch forward requires more energy than I have to spare.
Even starting feels overwhelming. Phone calls, forms, automated systems, waiting, rescheduling—it all feels like too much. Things I can do without income—organizing records, researching clinics—sometimes feel impossible. Phone calls alone feel like acts of courage I can’t summon.
Part of it is too much downtime. Too much isolation. Too much self-focused energy. When everything collapses, self-examination becomes unavoidable—but eventually it turns into a closed loop. Hyper-aware, overly nuanced, constantly monitored. No counterbalance. No external rhythm.
What I need to regulate myself again isn’t more introspection. It’s other people. Shared activity. Building something alongside someone else—a conversation, a meal, a walk—that reminds me I’m not the center of the universe. Something external to return to—a job, a volunteer shift, a class—that grounds me in the tangible world, where actions have immediate, shared consequences.
I don’t think I’m lazy. I don’t think I’m incapable. I think I’m overwhelmed in a very specific, very human way—one that sneaks up after prolonged isolation and loss, turning the ordinary into the insurmountable.
I want this to subside—not so I can become perfect or super productive—but so I can start taking care of the basics again. So that going to the dentist doesn’t feel like a mountain. So that renewing a license doesn’t feel like a crisis. So my energy can match the life in front of me, allowing me to handle what needs handling without the constant hum of resistance.
I don’t need everything fixed at once. I don’t need momentum or achievement to prove my worth. I just want my nervous system to settle enough that I can take care of myself—one small, ordinary thing at a time. Maybe starting with a single phone call, on a day when the weight feels a little lighter.
In the end, this overwhelm is the daily echo of starting below zero. It’s the material reality of trying to rebuild without a foundation, where even the smallest steps feel like they’re taken on shifting sand. Not knowing doesn’t mean I’m broken. Maybe desire needs time to regenerate after loss. Maybe clarity comes later, not immediately after everything collapses.
Tonight, I don’t have wisdom. I don’t have a lesson. I don’t have a conclusion.
I’m just sitting in the truth of not knowing—and trying to believe that this, too, counts as being alive.
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