Everything Was Missing

The Ecosystem of Deficit

Feb 12, 2025

Conversation about Fisherman Aesthetic, Pinterest, and Castlecore with Sydney

Everything, I said, is missing.

Which I meant in terms of the world and its creativity. A sense that there was too much and somehow not enough, too many names for things, too much making and yet not enough within these things made to sustain themselves. The sentiment, more aptly, a feeling of absence. That everything being made now housed within the labyrinth of itself and meaning and craft, a hollow space. And something, I knew, belonged and used to be there. That, in what was good, that space was always filled. Like a drink too full of ice, there was an illusion of fullness that, over time, revealed itself to be conceptually disappearing. And there was nothing one could do to keep it besides put it back somewhere cold. And even then it's all watered down. But of course, knowledge and art are incapable of being put back. So that was not the solution.

Everyone, they say, is a mirror.

I thought again, everything is missing.

And I thought after of January. Thought of the string of good movies I watched over two and a half weeks because I knew they were good and had yet to see them. How I’d put them all on a list I’d made because I wanted my life to improve, and I knew in a certain sense that part of that improvement involved finding these good things, rejecting the hollowness of everything else. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Rear Window, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Perfect Days, and then Nickel Boys, in that order. Finishing each with a sense of fullness and feeling the weight of them before bed. The kind of movies which after you have a sense of wanting to change something within you immediately. And in part, the string happened because the first film had been so rewarding, because I wanted to continue with those feelings.

Those feelings of fullness.

Waking those mornings following, finding still something alive within me, the desire to change, to improve, to work. A sensation which had been missing for a long time, so long I didn’t even know when it had begun not to be there. Just that, steadily, things got hard. That I had nothing to say, and what I did want to say, seemed out of reach and lacking vocabulary. Going to my desk with a certain reluctance, finishing for the reward of doing what I was supposed to, rather than because I said something I had been wanting to say, because I had something to say.

Once there seemed to be no room for any of it: working late and rising early, wanting, desperately, for life to feel better in all directions. Before January I tried to recover. Trying, very earnestly, sleeping earlier, better, journaling again, making lunch, saving money. Relieving stress where there was stress and pushing where one must push. Opening my book when I was tired, even for just two pages, writing on my break even when I wanted to close my eyes. Coming home with time for nothing because it was important I got to sleep on time. Not so misguided a thought, I want to make so I must fill my life with good and better things everywhere. I must do the things I’ve learned are important to do.

Life those days was very thin and watery. It moved so fast, slipped through my fingers. What had changed? Everything, which averaged out to nothing.

But you know I stayed up late to watch those movies. And nothing felt so good as those mornings after. To rise with a sense of fullness. The pull in me, the old feeling, of having ideas which needed to be expelled. For there to be that feeling I understood there first must be an emptiness. That when I said everything was missing, I was, in part, included.

I had been trapped. Trapped in an ecosystem of deficit and finding the cycles difficult to break. This wanting to make and create but having nothing within to pull from, coming home each night feeling there was no time, sleeping with a misplaced appetite. The confusion that my desire for creativity was the desire to create and not simply, a more legitimate hunger, closer to the body, of needing to fill a reserve that had been depleted. And not simply with the things that I had been doing, with sleep or rest, but consciously rich things which existed, stretching the pallet, to enfold my life with something truly satiating.

The movies had put something back. Had saturated me in a way. A lesson which seemed to say the tension of good and bad behavior is part of a richly textured life. That to extend oneself is more valuable if it is done earnestly in one direction. Moving into the labyrinth of need, finding the gap, filling it, recalling my long-lost appetite. A different ecosystem made, of staying awake just long enough, and taking care to sleep after, letting what has been devoured settle, the body doing what it does. Alchemy I suppose. Rising again to that old desire. Harder to get these days, but familiar all the same.

It has occurred to me, as I approach, in five weeks time, my 28th birthday, that much of growing up is accepting that what once was easy no longer is. That in fixing this, and finding the ease, things will change again, and I will spend a different age trying to get to the conclusion I have just drawn. Life, so full of its cycles.

And in their breaking, a period of confusion.

It reminds me of my friend who got married a couple years ago.

The weekend before it had rained and so there was the natural assumption that the following weekend it would not. But it did. Later it would be explained, from what I remember, which might not be a lot but is convenient for this story, that a pattern had begun. Storms, in their normal trajectory, would pass over us, eventually dispersing or disappearing in the way that they do. But for whatever reason, air pressure probably, they could not move on. There was a block or a jam, a wall they could not pass through. The usual lifespan of a storm paused. Trapped in their own pattern, with nowhere to go, they’d return to us each time. A seven-day process of resurrection.

For six weeks in New York every weekend it rained. So it stormed before her wedding, and after. And then it would rain all of October.

Eventually, it cleared, the cycle broke and New York was green. Even though Fall was there, it was hard to tell. Everything was alive. The lushness, I remember, the smell. All that water, yes, I think about it a lot, actually.

“I thought often of the chapter in Wuthering Heights were Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Linton’s drawing room and watch the brightly lit family seen inside. What is fatal in that vision is it subjectivity: looking through the window the truth and see different things, Heathcliff, what he fears and hates in Cathy, what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise, I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn't there.” Outline by Rachel Cusk

Then I, alone, and relived to be alone, perhaps went to a movie, or walked, or returned home and read, or sat in a park and read, or sat on a cafe terrace, or talked to people, or wrote letters. I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I wrote to my father asking for money. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life. — *Giovanni’s Room* by James Baldwin

We had a seat by the window. It was April and not yet warm and the window wasn’t open as the seat was popular and we only got it on the days no one was there to want it. February 3rd, 2025 11:11 PM

With you I couldn’t help it so I didn’t even try. February 2nd, 2025 10:38 AM

Shopping list to make a richly textured and improved life

5 good books read
15 lines in my journal
1 hour spent without music out in the world.
3 commutes without audiobooks
4 good movies
2 risky movies (that are hopefully good)
10 semi-late nights
1 really good dream that feels kinda real and leaves you in a hazy state of wonder and belief for the day
8 hours of digestive thought
4 conversations over tea and coffee about that which you have just seen that hopefully the other person has seen too

Here is a filling mood board for January (that has passed sry)

Chloé in Newsletter

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