The Big Empty

Or: This is what my bones are made of. How can I stand for anything without my bones?

Jul 12, 2025

I’ve spent the last three days barely able to drag myself off the couch. I say barely able, but the truth is I’ve barely had the energy to try, or to care that I couldn’t. Getting dressed and feeding myself feels like too much trouble, and I resent every moment spent in the kitchen, preparing food, eating it, cleaning up. I put my headphones in and watch an episode of Community while I eat, so I don't have to think about anything. I eat until my stomach cramps, then keep eating, too much dessert, curled up on the couch again with another episode or six. I switch positions every couple of hours. My stomach feels awful.

I pause the tv and sink into a daydream, an escapist fantasy of a different life, one where I have goals, love, community, purpose - a life without the Big Empty. An illusory life to distract me from the reality of mine.

I don’t know where this came from, this time. Last week was better - was good, even. I was writing, I was engaging, I had an idea for a new creative project, a novel, that felt aligned with the decolonization work I’ve been doing. I felt like I was taking steps out of my isolationist tendencies and building the capacity for meaningful engagement with the others who are doing this work. I’m learning how to pause, to react without defensiveness, to grieve without needing to stifle that feeling or run away from it. I’m learning how to feel things properly. Last week I was proud of the growth I was starting to see, the difference inside my own nervous system as I learn to move through my conditioning under white supremacy culture, and open myself to the possibility of re-becoming human.

And then I fell off a cliff. I’m still not exactly sure what pushed me over the edge. A little bit of everything, I think; it’s been a hell of a week to be a thinking person online, after a long series of a hell of a lot of other weeks that haven’t given us much hope to cling to. The grand opening of a new concentration camp in Florida, flash flooding in Texas, Laura Loomer ‘joking’ about feeding people to alligators, Ann Coulter complaining that our genocide of the First Nations didn’t go far enough. (These are my people. This is the legacy that whiteness bequeaths us). David Suzuki, the face of climate activism in Canada since my childhood, came out with a press release to tell the world that we’ve failed, that it’s too late, that climate collapse is here. That doesn’t mean we give up, he said. But we need to hunker down. I wonder for how many people this was the last straw, breaking the back of any remnant of optimism we had left.

I’ve been saying since January that I think I could face either the political climate, or the intensifying environmental catastrophe, on its own, but when I get hit with both at once my resilience short-circuits. Whether this is actually true I can’t judge, because it’s all at bottom a symptom of the same poison in the well, and my desire to compartmentalize these interlinked crises is itself a part of the problem. We can’t divorce climate concern from social justice, and I accept that. But that one-two punch this week completely gutted me, and not for the first time. This is how I felt back in January after Inauguration Day. My brain shuts down, and I get thrown back into running and numbing, all my most familiar maladaptive coping mechanisms. Daydreaming, sugar, binge-streaming. Cannabis. Not drinking, by some miracle, but craving pills. I’d sell my right arm for a hit of Molly right now, because I remember how it felt to ride that wave, and ten years without it apparently isn’t enough to silence that longing altogether. I reject anything that I know will actually make me feel better - fresh, seasonal food, working in my yard, writing, walking, biking, learning, crafting, reaching out to others. It’s too hard to even think about them. I don’t want to feel better. I want to feel numb.

My back is killing me because I’ve been lying prone for 72 hours. I wake up, feed the cats, go back to bed, knowing it will make me feel worse. I told myself I’d join the EAGER check-in this week, reach out to the others who are here doing this work alongside me, but the time comes and goes and I tell myself I don’t care. I don’t want to burden them, anyway. They’re all living it, organizing protests, doing something, and I’m just lying here, barely keeping myself afloat. I don’t know how to connect in more than a superficial way. I want recognition for doing this work, but is everything I do just performative? Am I just looking for a pat on the head from the pro-humanity educators who are taking such pains to baby us back into empathy, community, humanity? Wouldn’t it be better for them if we - if I - just didn’t exist?

I surfaced from my daydreams for long enough to write in my decolonization journal last night:

This is what is killing me today - I have known what racial innocence feels like, and I can never go back to that. Someone born into a Black, brown, or Indigenous body has never known what it is to be unracialized - they can’t share my perspective of this lost ignorance, of what it felt like not to bear that burden. And knowing that they suffer isn’t enough to keep me committed to this work. The temptation to tap out is always there. The memory of how it felt not to carry this pain. I’ve been running and numbing for two days straight. And I feel emptier now than when I began.

This is “white privilege”. Having a vacuum where my soul is supposed to be, a fundamental incapacity to empathize with anything that doesn’t reflect myself back to me. It used to be that I didn’t realize anything was missing - I mean, aside from the void that I desperately tried to fill with booze and drugs and sex for most of my adult life, but that’s just a human experience, isn’t it? Don’t we all feel that way? Learning that no, this is not a universal human quality, but a peculiarly white phenomenon, made the void at my heart visible to me for the first time, and I crave that old ignorance the way I still crave amphetamines. Knowing that I’ll bear this weight forever, the weight of being the oppressor, the perpetrator, without any possibility of a meaningful absolution, sends me back into flight from myself, and from the work.

Back when I first started engaging with EAGER, I volunteered to watch Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All The Brutes and write some reflection questions for a group watch party. The documentary affected me in ways that I didn’t expect. From my journal (CW for violent imagery):

I thought I wanted to write about the impact the show is having on me… but I’m still processing. I don’t have the words for it, yet. But watching it has to be transformational - it has to be, otherwise I just can’t live with it. I see the images of all the white men standing over heaps of corpses, forcing Black men to pose for photographs holding the severed hands of their brothers, the mountains of death and butchery wrought in the name of whiteness - and I can’t believe they haven’t risen up and thrown our bodies in a heap, and pissed on the grave. There is no such thing as white genocide, as the overt supremacists claim, but if there was - we’ve earned it. Seeing it all laid out, the sheer scale of it, from the Crusades to empire-building to the Holocaust to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Haiti and the Congo and Ireland and the Americas… all these horrors that somehow lived in my consciousness - if at all - as separate, distinct actions by a few misguided, evil men… seeing it all drawn into a single, deliberate policy aimed at extermination… it goes beyond white guilt. It’s too heavy for guilt. It’s unthinkable, but it’s real. And a week ago I don’t know if I could have borne it.
I don’t know what I’m feeling. It’s not outrage, shock, grief, or pain. There’s upset - there were tears as I watched, and I needed long breaks to get through two episodes. So much self-care to even be able to get through it and take notes. It’s not disgust, though there is disgust. It’s like a solid sphere of… something. Clay, or stone, sitting inside my chest and arms; there’s anger under its surface, but it isn’t anger or rage. The words “how dare they?” (How dare we?) come the closest to expressing it. It tenses up my whole body to focus on it.
Galvanized steel is a good match - that dull gray cold finish on the steel surface, kind of nubbly and rough, matte and impervious. Impervious is the wrong word. It’s not that I’ve been galvanized, in the sense of a call to action, but that my understanding of the harms of whiteness has been forged into a new whole. My body doesn’t know what to do with it yet.
It’s not pain, it’s not fragility, it’s not defensiveness (there can be no defence). If anything it’s radical acceptance, a knowing that I can’t run from. That I don’t want to run from. It’s not even heavy, in the sense of a weight crushing down on me - its gravity comes from within itself, it’s the centre of its own mass. It’s a clarity of understanding what has been done. Not yet what must be done, I don’t know what to do with it now that I have it, but I know that it’s mine by birthright, and I can either preside over another stack of corpses, cordwood for the blaze of white supremacy, or I can… what? I don't know yet. But I’m not afraid of it. What fucking value is my fear in the face of those corpses? This debt is bigger than my ability to repay. And that doesn’t excuse me from trying.

I’ve been trying to articulate this image of the sphere to myself more fully, in the weeks since I wrote the above, and it feels like trying to describe dark matter or dark energy - these can’t be observed directly, so we have to imply their existence from the effects they have on the matter we can observe. We find that galaxies behave internally as if they’re orders of magnitude heavier than the visible matter can account for; we see galaxies moving away from each other with a speed that only makes sense when we add a new ‘pushing’ force into our calculations. The math works, but it leaves us stunned to realize that visible matter, which we previously thought was all of existence, only makes up 4% of what’s actually out there. Peck’s documentary was the mathematics that showed me the driving force underlying all of modern European history since the Crusades, a unified field theory of extermination that is overt, systematic, and coherent in its effects, clear and obvious to everyone except those of us who are most tightly bound up within its influence. Peck made me visible to myself for the first time, by telling me the story of myself in a way I’d never heard before. He showed me that everything I thought was me was just the tip of the iceberg, and that I owe the deepest, most immovable part of my character to a global project aimed at putting me on top of the next heap of corpses. I couldn’t see that project until he pointed it out; it remained invisible to me in my racial innocence, my lack of historical awareness, my denial of any personal accountability for the atrocities I’ve benefitted from. We say “that was centuries ago, you need to get over it,” as the death toll continues to rise. We say “it’s nothing to do with me,” and wonder why we’re so unhappy.

Last week, I was asked by a Black educator to consider that the people of the United States deserve foreign retaliation, deserve to be nuked, for their apathy and ignorance, their crimes against the rest of the world. Wrestling with this idea brought me to grief - grief in the healthy sense, a depth of feeling that I’m not used to entertaining, a genuine, raw, authentic heartbreak that felt like progress in the moment. As a citizen of a country that may find itself pulling the trigger on that retaliation, as someone wrestling with the idea that violence is my most authentic inheritance and legacy in this world, as someone who has been offered a glimpse of healing and a way forward that repudiates that conditioning, accepting his perspective felt like giving up. Because I can see my complicity now, and I guess it means I deserve to be nuked too. Back to my journal again:

I can’t help but think that this current state of emptiness might be a rebound from that. I walked too close to the fire of decolonization work and the supremacy culture ingrained in my bones re-activated to pull me back in. It’s been whispering in my ear - you’re nothing without me. There’s no future worth working for. It’s over, give up the fight. Your dreams are pointless because you don’t know if you’ll be able to feed yourself in five or ten or fifteen years. Who needs another writer, another novel. You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself again. This is a burden that you’ll have to bear for the rest of your life, and there’s no forgiveness, no absolution, no returning to a state of innocence, you’ll never know another moment’s peace, until you’re dead, and that’s starting to look more attractive every day. The world wants you dead. There’s no place for whiteness anymore, so there’s no place for me.

I promise I’m not suicidal. I’m really not. There’s no need to stage an intervention. I’m sharing this because I need to show how deeply supremacy culture has its hooks in me, that it can make me think that dying is preferable to accountability. And that makes me fucking angry.

Decolonization in a white body is shadow work. This is how it’s done - within and between ourselves, as the inheritors and instruments of the European genocidal project. It’s devastating to see ourselves with this kind of clarity, for essentially the first time in our collective history. But as soul-crushing as that clarity can be, I had to come to the realization that it isn’t the work that’s making me feel this way. This weight that’s dragging me down, that’s telling me to give up, that it’s too hard - this is supremacy culture asserting its hold on me. This is the lie of whiteness, telling me that it’s the only thing that exists, that I’m nothing without it, and that the pain of divesting from it isn’t worth the trouble. This is real-time data showing what supremacy culture has to offer me: emptiness, running and numbing, isolation, craving, and self-loathing. It tells me that there’s nothing but pain for me in this work, nothing beyond the bounds of what it legitimizes. That abdication is easier. That I should just lie down and die, if not physically than spiritually. And in telling me that, in making me believe it, it keeps me in line, keeps me silent and complicit, instead of fighting for a future where it no longer exists. From my journal:

This is literally how supremacy culture operates in and through a white body, that solid sphere of black, sucking gravity dragging me back down into its orbit. This is the lack of imagination that can’t envision a world without hierarchy and exploitation. This is the limit of its reach, the blinders it puts on me to keep me from seeing that anything else is possible. And right now it’s winning. I can’t see anything outside of it. But that’s not a good enough reason to assent to it. I don’t have to believe it. If my entire soul is made up of mendacity and violence, why should I submit to the violent lies that are leaving me catatonic, in a state of mindless consumption? Why is this more true and valid than optimism, than the belief that I’m capable of true human connection, that there are friends and lovers and a community out there for me, and that the effort of breaking out of this box is worth it? Why should I believe it’s more truthful just because it’s more painful? Why should I be exempt from the work just because I’ve never had to disrupt my comfort up until this point? Because I’ve been allowed to live my life swaddled in the illusion of safety and comfort and convenience, to the point where it’s made me so fragile that I can’t bear the thought of moving through discomfort to fight for a better world?

In bringing me to the point of suicidal ideation, supremacy culture has shown its hand. Because that is its true nature, the kernel at the heart of Europe’s darkness: whiteness is a logic of suicide. Nobody, in the end, is ‘white enough’ to escape its violence. It’ll destroy everything and everyone, including itself, including the only viable biosphere within reach or observation, before it gives up its chokehold on the world. I dared to raise my head above its influence, to listen to a teaching that promised liberation for everyone, and this rebound into despair is just physics. Blind, uncaring, inhuman, methodical, working according to its own internal laws, laws that don’t rely on any one white individual to keep producing the intended effect. The purpose of a system is what it does, and the purpose of supremacy culture is to grind up the majority for the profit of the few. If part of that majority is a white-bodied race traitor, all the better. Let that be a lesson to anyone else who’s thinking of stepping out of line.

In a conversation with another member of EAGER a couple of weeks ago, I revisited that image of the sphere, and something he said sparked a perspective shift in me. He’d asked if any of us had experienced disorientation or directionlessness when we engage with decolonization work, and we had the following exchange:

Me: Yes I’d say disorientation is a fair description… like floating in open space without any reference for up and down. It’s been manifesting really strongly for me as brain fog (which is partly hormonal but definitely worse when I’ve just finished a meditation or when I’m trying to journal specifically about decolonization work).

When I watched Exterminate All The Brutes I had this strong image of supremacy culture as a solid sphere of galvanized steel sitting around my chest area, about the size that I could almost reach my arms around it, and exerting its own gravity from within it that was drawing me tight around it. Not weighing me down exactly but pulling me in? And whenever I do anything that starts to disrupt that energy I feel sick, like gravity shut off and I’m free falling.

Chris: YES, it's a like a two punch combo. Supremacy tries to pull you in but then the outside pressure of "If I'm not seen as white" I won't be understood. As soon as you pull enough away from the gravity, the fog comes rolling in and covering everything and then we start falling. It's like "Moment of Clarity" to "Free Fall" to "Fog" and then you're back at the sphere trying to draw you in 🤔”

Me: You just gave me an idea of a gravitational assist like a spacecraft… maybe we have to cycle through this enough times that we build the momentum to fly free, and there’s another gravitational source just out of sight that we can someday orbit instead? And our educators can see it and point to it, but we can’t FEEL it yet because the pull of supremacy culture is too strong. But if I can believe it’s out there then maybe being disoriented is tolerable?

This is the image that I’m holding to, as I fight against the pull of this gravity. I don’t have to understand how to free myself in order for this work to make a difference. I can trust that others can see the way forward, and I can follow their lead, and I can accept that sometimes collapse is part of the process. I can trust that this descent into despair, the agony of mind that held me prostrate for the past three days still has value, because I can tap into it and turn it into words that will, maybe, help other European Americans feel less alone in their own pain. When I was quitting smoking I had a dozen relapses before it took, and maybe this is just how the physics of decolonization needs to play out, so we can release the grip of supremacy culture just enough for the rest of the world to fly free of us forever. I’m not as fragile as I think I am. I can handle this pain, for the sake of humanity. It’s not the most inspiring insight, but right now it’s what I have to work with. It’s enough to get me off the couch and in front of my keyboard.

What I’ve learned this week is that supremacy culture doesn’t just crush me with weight - it’s more dangerous when it promises an END to the pain. When it comes in a cloak of numbness. When it asks me to turn off my brain and give up. When it makes excuses for me - I just can’t deal with this today, it’s ok to fall away from the work, just close your eyes to it and imagine a different life where none of this has to matter. Write yourself an imaginary story that doesn’t violate the premises of supremacy culture. Distract yourself at any cost. Assent to the despair. Let the sense of urgency choke you into inaction. Let the One Right Way tell you that your contribution as a writer is meaningless, that it isn’t as good as direct action, organizing, marching, standing up to ICE, burning down a plantation. Let individualism tell you that you’re too good for this, you’re destined for something better. Ignore everything you’ve ever learned about radical honesty and how much easier it gets when you face your darkness instead of running from it. Protect that right to comfort at all costs.

The truth is, I’m not alone in this, even when my own brain tries to convince me otherwise. I have a community, I just haven’t learned how to lean on them yet. This article is a step towards changing that. We all feel so alone, but we’re all orbiting the same gravity well, and we can learn to work together to reclaim our humanity. Everything I write these days ends with a call to join EAGER, because they’ve helped me so much, and I want others to have access to that same help. But I also want to point people over to my personal blog, Mindful Dopamine on Substack. For thirty years I’ve specialized in running and numbing, and it’s not lost on me that one of the ways supremacy culture keeps its hooks in us is by drowning us in cheap dopamine - booze, drugs, shopping, binge-eating, doomscrolling, escapism of every kind. I’ve spent a lot of time taking a long, hard look at my own destructive patterns, finding alternatives that affirm my life instead of draining it, and trying to write about my experience in a way that can help others do the same. If this resonated with you, you might find some value there, even though I’m still in the early stages of publishing. Everything I write is offered for free at this time, and likes, shares, and subscriptions are deeply appreciated as I try to grow my audience.

This morning, I watched a video on Instagram talking about David Suzuki’s message that we’ve failed in the fight against climate change, and they gave his words some important context. The headline is misleading, and (I think) deliberately panic-inducing: “‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost.” But this doesn’t mean we give up. His point is that the systems and institutions we’ve relied on to save us have failed. Our governments and nonprofits and the capitalist greenwashing that has kept us in this vicious loop of performative consumption masked as conservation have failed us. We can no longer put any trust in the existing world order to make the necessary changes. He isn’t calling for despair and defeatism, in spite of admitting that Trump’s election was “the dagger in [his] heart…. The triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism.” Reading the actual article, and not just the headline, shows that he’s calling for revolution. Explicitly. “We need revolution,” he said in that iPolitics interview. “Can you have a peaceful revolution? I don’t know…. What we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together.” Unfortunately for us as white people, our community is made up of other white people, and we don’t yet know how to live and work in solidarity with one another. But it’s no coincidence that the solution to both white supremacy culture and surviving the climate catastrophe is identical. The unit of survival is your neighbourhood. And for us, this means that we urgently need to start healing ourselves and each other, addressing the trauma we’ve inherited from our legacy on this planet and our crimes against the rest of humanity, so that we can build the kinds of communities capable of sustaining themselves through what’s coming. We don’t need to keep sitting around and waiting for our governments to stop exploiting us and take our future seriously. We can start doing this work right now, today. It’s not easy, but many people who know better than me have told me that there’s more joy and connection and love available to me on the other side of this work than supremacy culture ever allowed me to imagine, and that’s the future I want to keep fighting for.