Day 7: Chronic Emptiness - The Quiet Ache Inside.

This post is part of a 10‑day series exploring the nine criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), followed by my personal diagnosis story. These posts are educational in nature and rooted in lived experience — they are not intended as tools for self‑diagnosis.

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There’s a kind of emptiness that doesn’t come from lack.

It comes from disconnection, from self, from others, from meaning.

It’s not always loud.

Sometimes it’s just a quiet, persistent ache.

A sense that something is missing, even when everything looks “fine”.

The DSM calls this “chronic feelings of emptiness.”

But that phrase doesn’t capture the way it settles into your bones.

The way it follows joy like a shadow.

The way it makes even the good days feel thin, like they could collapse under their own weight.

What This Looks Like For Me

I used to think I was just ungrateful.

I had people who loved me. I had things to look forward to.

But still…I felt hollow.

Like I was watching my life from the outside.

Like I was performing instead of participating.

Sometimes I try to fill it with food, with noise, with people, with plans.

Sometimes I try to numb it, with sleep, with scrolling, with silence.

Sometimes I just sit in it, unsure if it will ever leave.

It isn’t sadness.

It’s absence.

And it scares me more than pain ever did.

What Helps

• Naming it. Realizing this was a symptom, not a personal failure, gave me so much relief.

• Connection. Not just with others, but with myself. With my values. With my body. With God.

• Creating meaning. This blog. My drawings. It all helps me feel like I’m striving towards a bigger purpose.

• Therapy. Especially learning how to build a stable sense of self, so I didn’t feel like I was disappearing when things got quiet. (The biggest thing I’ve learned is that all of my issues tie together and I have to work on them all at once, not one at a time.)

If You Relate

You’re not broken for feeling empty.

You’re not ungrateful.

You’re not alone.

That ache inside you isn’t proof that something’s wrong with you. It’s proof that you’re human and that you’re longing for something real.

You don’t have to fill the emptiness with noise.

You can learn to sit with it.

To listen to it.

To let it soften and eventually, to let it go.