Him-Shaped Void
Of course, in one of my deepening conversations around relationships, love, consciousness, all the good stuff, my soul sister Naty shared with me a new term I hadn’t come across yet… The Him-Shaped Void.
The Him-Shaped Void is an idea coined by David Deida. It states that when a woman (or someone with a feminine essence) loses a man (or someone with a masculine essence), what’s left lingering is a him-shaped void. It fills the energetic space of the person who last loved you the deepest because the core essence of the feminine is to BE love, to absorb it, and feel it and soak in it like a bath. And as we all know… nothing can actually be destroyed, only transformed.
So there I was, almost a year later since Michael. He had left for the military, and a lot had happened since we had been together, I was new in so many ways. I had let him go in so many ways. I had moved on in so many ways. And yet, I didn’t even realize the ways in which I still was holding on.
Very recently, I had a wake up call around relationship patterns, and specifically breaking out of the one I was stuck in. I stuck myself in it, let’s be real. I had been seeing other men, thought I was past Michael, had grown so much, felt so new, real big Saturn return stuff. The season started changing from Summer to Indian Summer and now toward Autumn, which meant I was shifting closets and pulling out sweaters. You know how you come to know your belongings pretty well? You know where things go, you’re used to seeing this piece of clothing and the texture of it. Eventually, your vision becomes passive because you’re not seeing anything new, so nothing is sparked to make you notice or question your surroundings. You’re simply comfortable, at home, and you accept what you see in your closet.
How could anything important worth noticing be hiding in there?
Somehow it escaped my vision for a long time that there was a down coat hanging in there. And underneath the down coat was a suit. That suit belonged to Michael. That suit was my him-shaped void, taking on yet another form… a physical form. Somewhere within all the chaos of my day to day life, and the other relationships and breakups, and Mercury in retrograde, and the self-realizations, came an unexpected phone call.
As I sat in the cafe where we first met, working on my computer, there he was… name and face popping up on my phone to say hello. Finally, almost a year overdue, I had a phone call with Michael that was a clear, communicative, open conversation in which we finally actually broke up. I came home that day and realized…
IT’S TIME TO CLEAN OUT THE FUCKING SUIT.
It’s kind of wild how David Deida’s concept of the him-shaped void took on an even more obvious expression for me. It’s like the signal was so loud, yet it still took me forever to hear it. That suit carried so much energy. That void, it wasn’t even from him anymore… it was the amorphous suit that was filling it, the IDEA of the strong, powerful man I once knew.
Obviously, it was time. The suit had to go, and it had been an intense WEEK or two already, I was cleaning house in so many ways. Everywhere I turned was a reflection of everywhere I turned. This guy I’m dating. CANCELLED. This job I hate. CANCELLED. This deep-seeded-childhood-trauma-fed thought pattern I’ve held onto. CANCELLED. This fear that has guided me to play it small and consider dreams as something outside of me instead of being created and manifested from within me because I can fucking do ANYTHING if I SAY SO. [First part of that thought] CANCELLED.
If you don’t already know this about me, I can tend toward the dramatic flare. But let’s be real, my life is a goddamn movie lately. No specific genre, it’s a little bit of everything, but Tarantino AND Kubrick AND Woody Allen AND James Cameron would all be involved. Ha. So my plan was to have a big dramatic final release. A finale on this chapter of my life, if you will.
My plan…
that morning was to get in my car with the suit, blast the love playlist we once made, cry and scream and sing and let it all out. I was driving to his friend’s mother’s place of work because I’m a nice person and wanted to return it. Then, I would release some more, delete the playlist forevah, go to a dance studio and let it out of my body, write this blog, and that would be the end of that.
My body had different plans. The week leading up to this day was extremely cleansing, to say the least. I had let go of a lot of emotion already and cleared things that gave way to, well, clarity. I woke up with energy and direction and excitement in my bones. The lingering energy from this relationship, this suit… it was so expired, I had already gone through so many life cycles after it, there was barely anything left there to give. When I got in the car that morning, I actually forgot about the plan. I was blasting the happiest pump me up music in the car, was vibrating on such a high frequency. It was good.
Until…
I got there, parked, walked in the store and handed over the suit… In that moment it all hit me at once, like a wave. I thanked her, quietly shaking, and left. I got in my car and it all burst out of me. At first, I just felt confused, and it took me a second to even identify my emotions because they were so intense. I wasn’t sad because he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I wasn’t hung up or mourning our relationship anymore. I wasn’t even hurt that if he were to be in town that he didn’t want to see me. The reason time froze and I lost it is because all of this energy from the him-shaped void… was NEVER balanced.
I spent so much energy on another to receive so little in return. And I cried because I can’t believe I would hurt MYSELF like that. I can’t believe I allowed myself to abuse my emotional energy for that long. I can’t believe I was able to block this from my vision so well for so long. And repeat it in cycles within other relationships. And block those from my vision too. And just keep on the hamster wheel until I died. And all in an instant, this wave came up and out as pain, forgiveness, release, clarity, and moving on.
This him-shaped void had already been reshaping itself for a long time. I suppose my childhood parts, my little prince and whoever else wanted to throw energetic tantrums in the form of self-sabotage, are the parts of me responsible for having kept the suit all that time. I’ve grown out of all this energy. Love has taken on many new definitions. And while the suit got to be the void for one last moment in my car, that ball of energy has now transformed into a wide open field with as much light pouring in as I will allow myself to receive. The wider I open, the brighter it gets.
This reminds me of something a really powerful healer told me recently. She said that I was having certain issues because my body couldn’t keep up with the rate at which my energy was expanding and elevating. Well, it feels like having that thing in my closet all this time surely didn’t help. Because when you see something every day, you tie yourself to that reality, convince yourself it is real, even if it’s zipped up in a down coat, being normalized by your conscious mind. I held my physical reality in one place, tethered to who I was when that piece of clothing meant something…
instead of allowing myself the freedom of an extra hanger…
I think I pretended to hide it from myself, when really I was clocking its presence under the surface probably everyday. You can only pretend to hide things for so long before they come out to play. Or hurt you. So I took action. I chose to unstick myself. I chose to release and let the empty space create itself. We don’t always have to choose to hurt. We can also choose to just be open.
And now… a journal entry…
“I love you, Michael. In an unconditional way. I release you and choose to stop holding on when there’s nothing good nor healed to hold on TO. Yes, I still compare others to you… to the you I knew, to the love we experienced. And I’m beginning to realize it was never YOU, but the feeling represented by you, the energy you once contained. That is reflected in me, and in so many others. I am relieved and happy that now I get an answer from the other side, an amount of clarity with which to release anything that doesn’t have the light, love, power, sustainability and KNOWLEDGE to hold on to me as deeply and eternally as I hold on to it. I love myself in this way. And any outside entity must bring the same level of awareness, of consciousness, of capacity, of love, to hold this form of my love in this human body. Now is finally the time where I get to love myself in this way and call in more of it and ONLY it… SO powerful. THIS is true love… clearing the space… wow.”
Eventually, it hit me that this past year, all these other relationships, the patterns, the stuck-ness… it was all because I was simply repeating the same old story on a loop. Finally closing this chapter was definitely the key, giving me closure and clarity. And then I finally understood the pattern, in the blink of an eye. Sure, months ago I had given myself as much closure as possible. But when something is created, it takes all of its creators to determine what happens to said creation because the totality of their energies are imbued in the entity. I was stuck, I had that suit in my closet, I had that seed in my heart because while I was able to release the creation on my end, the energy would still linger until everyone involved gathered to create clarity. To decide. To release the energy of love, and allow it to finally transform in my life to something new, something that’s mine that I can grow myself with whomever I choose, or perhaps just with myself. The point is… it’s been past due, my choosing to bring people into my life who can hold the same kind of energy as me and cultivate more of it, people who can handle their emotions and make conscious choices that they can communicate in a space with others that by its very nature REQUIRES communication. I finally let it go. I finally got rid of the suit. I finally choose to shape the void as something else. It doesn’t even have to be a void. It can just be potential. This incredible, open space within me that I’m building on anew.
Aho.
And so it is.