I’ve been sitting with this thought for a while in my retirement:
‘it might be worse to hide my emptiness than to hide my flaws’.
When I think of my flaws – the times I’ve been impatient, sharp-tongued, or quietly jealous – I don’t feel proud of them. They make me cringe when I remember. And yet, those flaws are visible. They come out in words, in actions. They can be noticed, challenged, even forgiven. In a strange way, they prove that something in me is alive, even if it isn’t pretty.
But emptiness is different. Emptiness is harder to confess, harder even to face in myself. It’s not the presence of something destructive but the absence of anything at all. No spark. No pull toward meaning. Just a hollow space where I expect to find myself. And because emptiness is quiet, it’s easy to cover. I smile. I stay busy. I keep the rhythm of ordinary life, and no one sees what’s missing. Sometimes I almost manage to fool myself too.
That’s why it feels worse. Evil at least leaves a trail; emptiness leaves nothing. It cannot be resisted or forgiven because it doesn’t show itself. And when it’s hidden well, it can grow unnoticed like a silence that thickens until it drowns out everything else.
I realise that if I hide my flaws, there’s still hope. Someone might call me out, draw me back to myself. But if I hide my emptiness, if I mask it too well, I risk disappearing into it. The scariest part is how quiet that disappearance would be, how easy it is to live a whole life looking fine on the outside while hollow inside.
So maybe honesty, even about the void, is a kind of courage. Maybe it’s better to admit that I feel hollow than to pretend I am whole. Flaws can be wrestled with. Darkness can be named. But emptiness, when it is hidden, just keeps expanding, until there is no one left to confess it.
– Anil Kumar