The Unnamed Hollows: Where Modern Addictions Take Root
Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash “Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow.”
—Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
There is an artificial glow that leaks over our days. Our eyes have slowed their blinking while, night after night, the flickering blue light of screens illuminates our faces in darkened rooms. This peculiar false moonlight is bright enough to light our skin, held only inches away from our noses. It does little, however, to brighten the parts of us that need it most, leaving untouched the places within us that require something other than stimulation to be held up to the light.
Social media promises us like-minded friend groups, nourishing interaction. It coaxes us in on the illusion that, by design, it’ll help us feel seen. In the same breath, it asks us to manage our appearances, to curate ourselves into versions that can be easily read and quickly affirmed. It tugs at our attention, continually pulling us elsewhere, away from real-world possibilities for real connection and belonging.
No matter how much the world may insist that this is connection, the body remains unconvinced. The difference between proximity and intimacy is something palpable to the most essential parts of us. We can feel it clearly late at night, when notifications thin out and the day loosens its grip on our consciousness. In those quieter hours, whatever has remained untouched and unspoken inside us begins to stir. The mind softens its defenses as the day softens to twilight, and the body makes a tentative bid for attention, patience, tenderness, and care.
Something essential has slipped out of frame. We feel its absence not as emptiness but as a crowded interior filled with needs that lack vocabulary. Grief searches for ceremony, as longing searches for address. In the absence of language that can hold these states, they circulate restlessly, pressing at the edges of awareness.
Addiction, or Misnamed Grief, and the Body’s Adaptations
This tension is not new. Human beings have always struggled to remain open to experience without being overwhelmed by it, to suffer without disappearing, and to love without turning away. Philosophers, poets, mystics, and healers have long been invested in these questions because they brush with what might give life its meaning. Among them, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once famously wrote, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” landing on how the words we use shape what we can perceive, notice, share, and tend to. Whatever falls outside the reaches of language risks becoming uninhabitable.
Dr. Christine Gibson: In twenty years working with trauma survivors from all walks of life—in clinics, emergency rooms, and addiction centers—I’ve observed how our bodies quite literally cannot find the words when dysregulated. Our brains’ language centers go offline when we’re in survival mode. What looks like addiction is often a body improvising regulation in a world that offers no co-regulation, no safe harbor, no linguistic framework for what safety even feels like anymore. This linguistic entrapment shapes our neural pathways, our relationships, and really, our very perception of reality. When the body cannot find the words to adequately convey an experience, it adapts as best it can.
This is precisely what John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows addresses. It contains a litany of newly coined words for unnamed emotions, identifying the gaps in our shared vocabulary, naming what has long remained diffuse. “Language is so fundamental to our perception,” Koenig writes, “we’re unable to perceive the flaws built into language itself.” Instead, “We would feel only a strange hollowness in our conversations, never really sure if we’re being understood.”
When feeling is denied language, it does not disappear. Beyond this linguistic boundary, language starts to thin out. Here, grief has no grammar, longing collapses into appetite, and overwhelm cannot be spoken without caveats or apologies. These are the unnamed hollows, where extractive systems rush in with a platter of substitutes, from substances to screens, each calibrated to soothe the ache without digging it up from the root or addressing it fully.
This hollowness becomes a background hum in daily life, the sensation of almost being met, almost being known. To quiet this discomfort, we scroll, consume, and distract ourselves, while everything we have never been taught how to say remains bottled up inside us. There is a hollow space inside each of us that we try to fill with eager anticipation, with sweetness and salt, with unsatisfied cravings that roll over us uninvited. We reach for our morning coffee to enliven us and the evening drink to soften us, practices long forgotten in our lineage that once followed the sun’s journey across the day. Our modern addiction to the fuels of industrial life, from petrol to plastic and from fast fashion to global supply chains, mirrors this same hunger. These systems steal from bloated empty bellies to feed overconsumptive greed. They fuel not only dissociation from human suffering, but also from animals and the shared earth that bears our unlimited desires. The platitudes do not fill the hollows, because we have misidentified what is missing: true purpose, relationships to all living things, and the existential awe of our very inception
Lesley: Spending time in addiction centers and hospital rooms as a chaplain, I have seen how often people reach for substances and devices not out of recklessness or disregard but as a last workable hope. Bodies naturally compel us to grasp whatever is nearest at hand, and what we reach for today has been made readily available, sold to us with false promises of fulfillment, escape, and connection. These gestures are not so much about seeking careless pleasure. More often than not, we reach outward to fill the unnamed hollows in a bid to survive.
What we call addiction is often misnamed grief, an adaptation to a society that has grown profoundly inhospitable to vulnerability, interdependence, and care. Poet Andrea Gibson once said, “I could never trust anyone who’s well-adjusted to a sick society,” and indeed, those who struggle most are often those who see things clearly. People who feel too much, who register the violence of systems, the slow grief of ecological collapse, the loneliness undergirding the mores of modern life, are often the ones who land up seeking escape.
The word “addiction” is diagnostic, implicitly critical, and its limits lie in its failure to name what comes before the reaching. In truth, addictive compulsions stem from incredible care, only this care can’t find any place to land. An addiction is a solution to a problem that is undefined, lives in shadows, often from our own conscious awareness.
A New Common Language
If addiction feeds on what we cannot name, then language is the first terrain of repair if we are to begin building a new world. We need a tongue that does more than translate transactions. We need a language that remembers how to bind us to one another, a common idiom for grief, for hunger, for the slow and ordinary labor of being human in fragile times. This is a practical demand that the words we live by be capable of carrying the weight of experience that currently falls through the cracks.
This is a sentiment echoed by Black feminist poet and thinker Audre Lorde. In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” she argues that “poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Poetry, in her formulation, allows feeling to crystallize into form, and form to lay the groundwork for new ways of being. Without such language, the deepest regions of experience remain inaccessible. In Lorde’s mind, what cannot be spoken cannot be transformed.
Naming what we feel, sharing it, formulating it in words is a necessary task if we are to meet each other with patience, tenderness, and true community again, to gear ourselves toward collective healing. Processing our grief, our pain, cannot be done in isolation. That alchemy can only take place in the spaces between one another.
This is a task we have forgotten and need to return to, according to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which offers the word “anaphasia,” or “the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions that have nothing left in common with each other—each defending their own values, referring to their own cultures, speaking in their own untranslatable language.”
Indeed, this is a condition that is palpable, cellular. Like a whole pulled apart, we’ve lost our sharedness, along with a common, connective language through which to regain connection. We remain trapped in bounded areas where the joy of some people cannot be translated into the sorrow of others, where recognition falters. We are so attuned to our screens, to false kings and fabricated images of a beautiful world, that we no longer attune to the pain and suffering of our collective consciousness.
Doctor, writer, activist, and political educator Dr. Ayesha Khan has written about how colonial and extractive languages often fail to carry collective pain, which helps explain why so many of our attempts to speak to suffering land in incomprehension. These languages excel at the grammar of ownership and authority, at cataloguing, classifying, and commanding. In the face of feeling, however, they fray.
Khan writes that “Colonial languages carry a colonial view of the world laced with oppressive ideologies—this shapes our binary, often reductive thinking while also leaving us at a loss for words when we want to express ourselves more deeply, wholly and fully.” Indeed, the consequences of these linguistic absences are immense, at once interpersonal, political, and ecological. Wildfires consuming entire towns, heat domes, coral reefs bleached white as bone—all these are the symptoms of our linguistic and connective poverty, and we can trace them back to the colonial grammar of extraction and objectification, which fuels capitalist agendas at the expense of our collective well-being.
If words are the architecture of shared life, then the first building task is craft: we must create names that people can use to point toward their interior weather. We also cannot invent these names in isolation. Rather, they evolve in practice: around kitchen tables, in group rooms, and along the margins where someone says, here is what this feels like, and another person answers with recognition. That exchange is the beginning of a common tongue.
Collective healing, changing the way we see, make, and move in the world, will therefore require us to probe the limits of this colonial language by spending time in marginal spaces where people already meet each other in incompletion and vulnerability. New meaning will need to be built relationally and collaboratively, rather than imposed.
Slowing Down and Beginning With the Body
The cultural anaphasia Koenig names is not only rhetorical; it is also anatomical. When we cannot make ourselves intelligible to one another, we lose the social scaffolding that helps our animal bodies regulate, mourn, and recover.
Language alone cannot carry everything. Bodies predate grammar, and they have a vocabulary all their own. When bodies cannot name what is happening for them, they express it in movement, in breath, in sensations that feel intolerable. These somatic states are not only signals to be acknowledged, held with compassion, and delicately guided into the range where we can cope; they are the raw material from which meaning can be made.
Moreover, the work of translation, whether somatic or verbal, requires time and the willingness to stay with an experience long enough for meaning to emerge. Modern life, however, defaults the opposite way.
Urgency culture dictates how we work and move, and even which emotions are permitted to exist at all. Feelings that require time, depth, and collective holding sit uneasily within a system, running on Adderall, that prizes speed, resolution, and forward motion.
Sadness, for instance, runs directly counter to urgency culture. It slows perception, thickens attention. It refuses to be rushed toward a solution or a quick fix. In a world structured around immediacy and productivity, sadness is inconvenient. More than that, it is illegible.
In a world where fawning and fakery are rewarded, authenticity is jarring. We have been conditioned to amplify our pain without giving it release. Or we suppress it through the ubiquitous happy face emoji, denying our perceptions and our emotional experiences of the full facets of daily strife.
Take Mediterranean culture’s melancholy, for instance, which has lived openly in olive groves and along coastlines for centuries, carried on the sea-salted evening air, and in Flamenco, Fado, Rebetiko, musical forms that could hold joy and grief without forcing a choice. These were songs not of emptiness but of fullness.
Modern life, however, has classified melancholy as a sickness, and experiences of sorrow must be as brief as possible so we can get back to the office, back to the task at hand. Sadness is medicalized, grief is pathologized, and alongside losing the validity of sorrow, we have also shed some of our oldest, most vital healing practices—those present in music, ritual, shared time, and community. Each of us comes from ancestors who were allegorical storytellers, makers of frivolous beauty, villagers connected to soil, and who released tension through dance and the hunt for sustenance.
When cultures lose their shared practices for holding grief, fear, and overwhelm, we’re left to find whatever new outlets we can. Substances, compulsions, and distractions step in not because they are desired, but because they are available.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers a way of thinking otherwise. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, she draws on a Black feminist tradition that understands survival itself as a form of inherited knowledge. Here, she discusses breathing underwater, which names the reality of how we must, at times, approach living within systems that were never designed to sustain us. There are ways to remain alive within them, and the question is not how to avoid the water altogether but how to learn practices that allow breath to return.
Gumbs’s underwater breathing is at once a metaphor and, in some senses, a somatic skill, a political inheritance of resistance, and a way of staying present inside overwhelming conditions. Moreover, for Gumbs, stories are one critical survival tool, a way of transmitting knowledge and insight to handle white supremacy, capitalist acceleration, and climate anxiety without committing the body entirely to collapse or numbness. It asks that we allocate shared time to grieving and to naming so that sorrow does not calcify into compulsion.
If we prioritize practices that restore this capacity to dwell, if we deliberately slow our calendars, train our attention to listen, and invest in communal rituals of meaning-making, then we might be able to hold the hollows toward the light. What was once diffuse and unspeakable might become habitable.
Addiction will not vanish overnight, but the conditions that make it such a powerful attractor begin to loosen their grip. When experience can be felt, named, and held in relationship, the urgency to anesthetize it diminishes.
The work, then, begins in the spaces where people already meet each other in incompletion and vulnerability—around kitchen tables, in community gardens, in moments when someone can say, “this is what I feel like,” and another answers with recognition.
Dr. Christine Gibson: In somatic therapies, we teach people to listen to their body’s wisdom—an ancient language that comes before words—reconnecting them to the nervous system of safety and calm. The quick inhale that accompanies joy. The racing heart that precedes panic. The gut instinct that wants us to tear it all down. All bodies, human and other, speak a language older than words, and when we learn to listen, what I call interoceptive capacity, we find it’s telling us exactly what we need.
Lesley: When I have been able to offer my presence without agenda, without fixing or instruction, with a willingness to be with others through difficult, painful moments, the gilding of those distractions starts to rub off. Emotions rush back like blood to a numb limb, with surprising force. People encounter parts of themselves they believed had disappeared completely, when they’d merely been suppressed. Tears arrive without warning, long-buried grief makes its way to the surface. Again and again, the same sideways truth is made clear to me, that people have only been trying to survive the ache of being unseen, of sitting with a feeling they do not know how to name, trust, heal, and transmute.
Our addictions, seen as solutions to the complex nature of existential pain, are not failures but evidence of our profound capacity to care, misdirected toward objects that cannot hold our love. Perhaps in creating language for our wordless hungers, we can begin to uncover the riches of what we share, ready now to learn a mother tongue that sounds like justice and feels like coming home. We need new words not to fix our addictions but to honor them as misdirected sacred hungers. In naming them truly (collectively, somatically, poetically), we might find our way back to each other, one unnamed sorrow at a time.
References
Brown, A. M. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
Gibson, A. (2021). You better be lightning. Button Poetry.
Gibson, C. (2024). The modern trauma toolkit. Penguin Random House Canada.
Gumbs, A. P. (2020). Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals. AK Press.
Khan, A. (2023, January 22). English is a limiting language that prevents us from communicating with complexity. Cosmic Anarchy.
Koenig, J. (2021). The dictionary of obscure sorrows. Simon & Schuster.
Lorde, A. (1984). Poetry is not a luxury. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 36–39). Crossing Press.