Visionaries Need Voids

I'm no stranger to a void.

At least, I haven't been in the past 5 years.

Prior to my Saturn Return stripping my life bare, I always pushed forward, filled my days and went above and beyond, regardless of what it cost me to do so.

And then I went through one of the greatest crumblings of my career, my love life, my sense of self, until a shell of who I was remained.

I resisted it like hell at first.

Who was I if I wasn't overachieving?

I had no clue, but in the years that followed, I slowly found out.

I discovered exactly who I was, well really, who I'd always been, in my mornings spent by the water with my camera and the moonlight above the waves guiding my lens.

In the slow afternoons spent on my sofa, listening to the sound of seagulls and the lifeguard call-outs, whilst I lost myself in a fantasy book.

In the projects I started for pure passion, where I remembered what it was like to feel truly lit up again.

Somehow, in the time when my finances dipped, my social calendar cleared and the opportunities dried up, I remembered what it was like to not look successful, but to feel it.

I got to give space to the ideas that were suffocating inside of my typically overfull schedule and I remembered what it was like to think outside the box, colour outside the lines and chase a spark, instead of burning out.

Of course, I saw that as a momentary blip on my otherwise clear trajectory, though.

I'd have my crumbling and then I'd pick up the pieces and move on.

And I did, except what I hadn't accounted for was that this void wasn't just a scheduled stopgap.

It was a place I needed to return to again and again, as often as my pull towards alignment needed me to.

A place I've found myself in recently.

The other day, a psychic shared that my guides really wanted me to have space. They weren't sabotaging me, in the ways my self-doubt tried to convince me of, they were intentionally keeping things at bay, for better things to fall in.

I didn't like the sound of that, even though my soul silently confirmed its truth.

I wanted to push. To do tangible things. To receive tangible outcomes. To have something solid to work on. To be affirmed from the accountability of action.

But the second I surrendered, it all started to make sense.

Those niggling ideas I've been shoving down broke free from their confines and the words I'd been choking on suddenly found their expression.

The jumbled puzzle pieces started piecing together until they painted a clearer picture. One that still had smudges and unfinished sections, but enough coloured in that you could fill in the gaps with imagination.

And what I've been sitting with in the space is that visionaries really need voids.

They need space in the calendar where nothing is expected of them and they get to explore outside of the confines.

They need to switch off from the way the world currently operates to imagine one that makes far more sense.

They need to tend to themselves to carry the weight of what the world begs from them.

And that isn't always conducive to our need for survival, for the expectation of us to push through, churn out, show up, achieve… the list is never-ending.

But part of being a visionary is rebelling against that, no matter how uncomfortable it is to do so.

Last week, I shared how I've been stepping back from scrolling so much to give space to that visionary thinking. And in the gaps created from what I'd usually fill with scrolling, I had many void-like movements where I longed for the distraction of a doom-scroll, to avoid the discomfort.

But somewhere in the stillness, I started to lean into the fact that the void-like spaces are necessary.

And that's what I'm sitting with in this week’s episode…

I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of us who are here to birth a new way of doing things are being intentionally granted space right now. The influencer era is collapsing. A lot of things that used to work simply don't anymore. And people are doing things that feel drastic, stepping away from social media, from the hustle, from the metrics, because we're in a genuinely revolutionary time.

I believe this is visionaries' time to step forward. But you cannot step forward from a place of constant output. You need the pause first.

I'm reluctant to even call it a void, actually, because I think so many of us carry negative connotations with that word as if it means blank, empty, wasted. I prefer to call it the fertile void. Because it's not nothing. It's where the seeds are really being planted, where the realisations land and where the ideas you can't access when you're constantly plugged in finally find you.

Visionaries exist a lot of the time in their imagination, in their journals, in being in their bodies. And when we're always on, always churning out, we genuinely don't have the space we need to be in that visionary energy that I believe the world needs from us right now.

Something I've been sitting with a lot lately is how the world isn't set up for the way visionaries actually work.

We need more time to integrate things deeply, to embody what we've experienced, to have stretches where we're not plugged in or pushing forward. We need a lot of time in being, so that those ideas can find us, so that we can reimagine things, rather than just repeat them in slightly different packaging.

Because here's what I know for myself: a lot of what I've been pushing forward on is still very much of the old way. I'm still doing things the way I know because it feels safe, because it's familiar. And this pull for space? It's because it's in these gaps that we can actually imagine something different. When we stop pushing forward, we create the pause that makes doing things differently possible.

Since I've taken this space, something has cracked open. After a period of quite heavy brain fog, I feel like things are channelling through me again. I'm writing in a way I could only have dreamed of a few months ago, mornings and evenings at my desk, pouring into it, finally giving the deep creative work the attention it deserves rather than only writing in service of my marketing.

I've also been doing a lot of crafting. It's been remarkable for me mentally, something I've felt intuitively, but have since heard echoed back by so many of you sliding into my DMs with actual evidence of the health benefits. It's so incredible how craft found me, or rather refound me, at exactly this time when I'm pouring so deeply into my creativity.

And here's the thing I keep coming back to: I wouldn't have reached any of this if I hadn't stopped pushing so hard.

Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down way, although if that's how it happens, so be it, but in a quieter, more intentional way. Tending to my nervous system. Doing the work that keeps me financially supported while also genuinely protecting the space where the visionary ideas can arrive. Because those little nudges and niggles that we shove down when we're busy? They need attention. They're trying to tell us something.

Now is the time to not just imagine a new way, but to actually explore and experiment with it. To add an element of play. To ask: can I allow for space so that what I'm really here to build can actually come to life?

I think for a lot of us, those who left corporate and opted out of the status quo, we've found ourselves in very similar cages to the ones we escaped. Running our businesses with all the same rules, outsourcing our genius to external frameworks, grinding in ways that feel indistinguishable from what we were fleeing.

The fertile void is the antidote to that. It doesn't guarantee anything. But it's where the real reimagining happens.

I'm anchoring into that now, more deeply than I have before, because I'm finally starting to understand just how necessary it is.

And I hope this lands for you too, wherever you are in your own void. Whether you're resisting it, just arriving in it, or starting to find your footing within it.

You may enjoy this episode of that’s you.