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I haven't written like this in years, or even attempted to write like this. All that I know is that when I do write--not to comfort myself or wallow or impress--in a way that pours out all that I have onto a blank page, raw and imperfect, in a way that literally empties what I have, my fears and hang-ups and pettiness--when I write like this, I become empty enough to be filled by something else. So after a long while--Ryan, I am sorry--of not emptying myself, I am. I have no expectations to produce anything eloquent but I send it to you because I have realized that it is important that YOU read it. You are the people who know me, who speak into my life, past the bullshit that the world feeds, and it is important that you hear my confession, my release.

What I am realizing through all this talk of emptying and filling is that the Buddhists got it right. The world tells me that if I plunge deeper, if I seek inside, if I can meditate enough to enter my own psyche, the answers are waiting for me. This may be true in small ways. But mostly what I have found is that when I plunge inside, so deep, alone and isolated, I become lost in a world of self-pity that is sickening, honestly. My entitlement and bitterness become parasites I am chained to, that I willingly feed because somehow, it feels good. It feels good to fall so deep that I feel big.

But all I need is one glimpse, one moment of perspective to realize how small I have truly become.

And here is why emptiness matters: even if the answers are somewhere inside, it is too polluted in there to find them.

Buddhists believe that emptiness is the only state to find peace, the only state where one can achieve Nirvana. Their paradox is the acknowledgment that emptiness does not mean non-existence--that a cup is never truly empty for if there is no liquid, or solid, air will fill the space. Their focus then is what the cup is empty of, because it will undoubtedly be filled by something--that is the essence of being.

When I am filled with myself, the story I tell is a petty one, full of injustice and anger and entitlement. And though emptiness may be the road, it is not the destination. Because despite being empty of my own pollution, the air that fills the emptied space is what matters.

Jesus does not direct me inward because of a hopeless defeat, because there is nothing good to be found there, but rather in sympathetic understanding that the chaos is too much, that I will get lost, and that I need help pulling the good from the rubble. Jesus brings me out of myself. And the irony is that only when this happens am I free to find what I have been desperately searching for inside.

God's grace that fills my emptiness is what brings the peace I seek, her love is what sustains and comforts, what satisfies. His peace only comes when I will step outside myself in humble declaration that I am hopeless left to my own devices because I don't have the wisdom or omniscience to know how to not become entangled.

It's enough to send me into another swirling toilet, drowning in shit (pardon the metaphor) but I can't. And that is the point of my rambling process of emptying.

In seeking so long for answers to questions I feel God has been ignoring and life has been ignoring and people have been ignoring, I became impatient and impertinent and I plunged to my own devices (sorry for all these toilet metaphors).

And so I have been splashing and kicking and screaming, angry that I cannot find what I am looking for, what I know is there because I feel the necessity of its presence for life, but refusing to swim to shore and leave my pool of self-reliance. What a fool I have been.

Do not mistake this as a moment of receiving answers, God knows that is not what it is. And honestly, I don't think I will find many of the answers I seek in my lifetime.

But this moment of enlightenment, of epiphany, comes out of my own helplessness and brings me to the small albeit transformative realization that filled with anything other than the love of God out of his grace, I will drown in bitterness, plummeting myself and all relationships I have to a place of lifelessness, of death. And I will waste my life there, entangled by the mess that prevents real, breath-giving, laughter-causing, tear-dripping, joy-abounding life from renewing me.