The Feeling of Nothingness

Is 'nothingness' even an English word?

Philosophers like Jean-Paul Satre wrote about nothingness as existential freedom, the space were meaning can be created.

Nothingness is a real philosophical, literary and psychological term but it feels...made up.

It feels like something you say when you don’t actually know what you’re feeling. Like a placeholder. Like when someone tells you to be more specific, and you can’t because there is nothing specific to describe.

Nothingness sounds like it's dramatic and almost theatrical. It feels like something that belongs in a philosophy textbook or a black-and-white film where someone stares out of a rainy window. But when it settles inside you, it is not dramatic at all. It is quiet. Too quiet even.

Sadness announces itself as it swells in your throat and spills over your eyelids. The feeling of nothingness feels somewhat terrifying because unlike anxiety that shakes your hands and tightens your chest, nothingness does not burn. It does not ache or scream but it sits still.

How do you fight something that isn’t there?

There are days when I try to trace it back to a cause. Maybe I am tired or overwhelmed, or maybe I care too much about too many things, and my mind has decided to shut down like a laptop overheating on a cluttered desk. But nothingness doesn’t feel like stress.

Nothingness feels like walking through your own life with the volume turned down. You laugh and nod because the moment requires them. You do things that you normally do but inside, it's just flat. You are neither happy nor unhappy, you are neither.

And in a world that constantly demands intensity and tells you to be passionate, be driven, be emotional, be expressive. Being neutral sometimes feels like you're failing.

There is guilt attached to nothingness. It is like looking at your achievements, opportunities and feeling nothing. You look at people who love you and you know you love them too, but the feeling does not surge the way you think it should. Almost like you are numb.

So you begin to wonder if something is wrong with you.

I've come to the realization that nothingness is not the absence of but the body’s quiet rebellion against too much feeling. Maybe when you have carried anxiety for too long, grief for too quietly, or a range of emotions all at once, your nervous system decides it cannot keep vibrating at that frequency. So, it lowers the volume and freezes. We don’t talk enough about freeze. Freeze looks like staring blankly, existing without participating.

Freeze looks like nothingness. And even in nothingness there is evidence of something.

You notice, question or even write about it.

If you truly felt nothing, you would not be disturbed by it. You would not search for language or sit with the discomfort long enough to give it a name.

The fact that nothingness unsettles you means something inside you still longs to feel.

That longing is not empty.

I don't believe nothingness is a void. I see it more as a pause like a space between chapters.

We are so afraid of emptiness that we rush to fill it with noise, with productivity, with distractions. But perhaps nothingness is just asking for rest. Nothingness is not proof that you are broken but that you are overwhelmed.

You just have to admit that you feel...nothing and just wait until a temporary feeling like nothingness finally leaves. You may get your spark back in small, almost forgettable ways. Probably a song that stirs something, a sentence that lingers or a laugh that feels slightly more real than the others.

Nothingness feels endless when you are inside it, but it is still a feeling and feelings move.

So yes, nothingness is an English word, and I don't think it is not made up anymore.

It is a name we give to the quiet, resting spaces inside ourselves.