You want to know what makes me nervous?

Nothing.

Stretches of nothing make me nervous. The great plains with their endless horizons. A fresh journal. A blank canvas. A day with no urgent plans.

A new, untarnished year.

For most of my existence I pictured my life as a book that was being written as I lived it. I spent inordinate amounts of time agonizing over my mistakes, because they were now part of that permanent record.

No matter how hard I tried to do everything right, the pages of my life still ended up with scribbled-out passages, misspellings, huge blobs of ink, tear stains and dumb, dumb shit I never should have said.

It wasn’t a very helpful way to view my existence, and with years of therapy I’ve managed to learn a bit about accepting my humanity, failing with a modicum of grace and moving on without obsessing over imperfections.

But I still hate blank spaces. They represent the possibility that I could mess up, fill them with the wrong thing, make them ugly, ruin them.

Just thinking as I type this out, it occurs to me that I could re-envision the empty stretches. Instead of blanks waiting to be filled in, perhaps these uncluttered voids are more like negative space.

In art and design, negative space is a way to use what isn’t there to highlight what is. It is the nothing that makes the Something stand out.

Maybe the blank spaces don’t always need to be filled in.

And if I do choose to fill them with something, maybe it will be the right thing.

It’s my life, after all.