The Hollowing

Most women have been in this place.

Maybe you feel like something is just 'off', out of kilter, and maybe has been for a while, but you can't put your finger on what it is.

Perhaps you have been through some change: a new job, a relocation, a family transition, a loss. The change is clear, but that deep feeling of unsettlement is loud and uncertain.

Maybe, like me, you just wandered hollow for a while. Doing the things you know you are supposed to do. Showing up. Delivering. Fulfilling. But feeling, well, carved out is perhaps the best way to describe it.

You aren't yourself, and you aren't sure who she is anymore.

This is what I call The Hollowing. You aren't lost. You're in between. To name it clearly: The Hollowing is the gap between who you were and who you are becoming.

This description also fits some other phrases I've seen tossed about: the messy middle, having a wobble, feeling lost. For me, The Hollowing just rang true. It depicted a hollowed tree. Empty, but still standing, still doing its job, still present. Just not really full of anything.

The Hollowing is a big part of the work I do within Reground. It's about identifying that part of your path, the 'in between' of things. It is also something I feel many women go through multiple times.

We have to name things. Names give power. Once we know the name of it, we can handle it and move forwards.

The Hollowing is not a breakdown, nor is it always a crisis. It's that hollowed-out feeling when something shifts at your core and the life you built around the previous version of you suddenly feels foreign, like it belongs to someone else.

This could be due to a loss, a relationship ending, a relationship beginning, parenthood, career shifts, a career that stopped mattering, relocating and finding your feet again, or even just a knowing that something has got to change.

Not only are the triggers things that can happen any old Tuesday, they are things that every woman will go through at some point or another. Sometimes with no bother at all, and other times creating a rippling effect and dipping you into The Hollowing with no warning.

From the outside, everything can look fine. I know for me that I still showed up to work, still showing up at home. I was doing all the same things I knew I needed to do to exist. But man, I was pretty empty. And I was frozen. I felt like I physically couldn't move. Mentally I knew what I needed to do to get past this feeling, but my body and brain were simply not connecting. After all, the body truly keeps score. It calls you out when you are trying to keep pushing on.

Because things look okay from the outside, I believe many women just keep going and don't really get a good look at what is truly going on inside for them. It's not until things start to fall down that we begin to panic and really look at what's happening. And even then, sometimes a sticking-plaster solution is all we manage before moving on.

The thing is: it's not just you. It was never just me. So many of us go through this phase of uncertainty, worry, fear, emptiness.

Still with me?

We have language for beginnings and endings, but not for this messy bit in between. There aren't really any clear maps on how to navigate it. There are no clear permissions to sit in it. We are just ready to carry on. Cos that's what we do, right? We hold it together. But it is lonely and isolating. It makes you feel alone even in a crowded room. But I assure you, you are not.

The Hollowing is a hard but necessary part of our path as women.

Our identities are meant to evolve, sometimes gradually, sometimes in leaps. I found something oddly comforting when I learned that this might be written into us biologically. One leading theory of menopause suggests that women evolved to live long past our fertile years precisely because older women became the knowledge-holders: the ones who carried the wisdom the group relied on. If that's true, then shifting and re-forming who we are isn't a failure. It's the work of becoming the wise woman we were always meant to grow into.

In order to change, we have to lose, or carve out, what we no longer need. The Hollowing is part of this letting go. It's the grief, loss and confusion that comes with change. And it makes space for whatever is coming next.

I spent a good while looking forward to getting 'back to myself', and I think this language, especially around new mums, is so damaging. I didn't realise how much so until I came out of it myself. That woman I was before I became a mother is gone. Specks of her still exist and are still intrinsically within me, but I could never get back to her. I had to let her go to step into who I am becoming now. And that process isn't overnight, nor is it easy. It came with grief and sadness and anxiety and worry, not only for what I lost, but also for what I didn't know, and what might come. But allowing myself to accept The Hollowing for what it was was hugely supportive in moving forward.

I repeat: The Hollowing is necessary.

It's not broken. Crazy. Problematic. It's making space to hear and see yourself. Reground has been created to support women going through The Hollowing. Realising the limit on resources available to women generally — but especially rurally — really drove me to create this, and give women a place to do the real work, away from the noise and the highlight reel.

A hollow tree doesn't fall. It stands for decades, and the space inside it becomes shelter for whatever comes to live there. The emptiness isn't the end of the tree.

It's what it makes room for.

If you are in it right now, please know you are not the only one, and you don't have to sit with it alone. I have started recording a podcast where I talk to women who have gone, and are going, through their own Hollowing and the first episode comes out shortly. Perhaps listening to their stories can help you take your own first step.

Go gently. Stacey