On emptiness, devotion, and what the 40s are quietly teaching me.

I used to show up every single week for Naruto.

Not casually. Not when I felt like it. Every week, without being asked, without needing a reminder. I hated it at first — the main character seemed lame, the art underwhelming compared to the shoujo manga I’d grown up loving. But somewhere after the wave arc, something shifted. The story got under my skin. And from that point until the very last chapter, I was there. Devoted. Completely absorbed.

I’ve been thinking about that feeling lately. Not with sadness exactly — more like curiosity. Because somewhere in my 40s, I noticed it had become harder to find. Cultural storms that swept everyone else up left me standing still, dry. Shows people called unmissable didn’t pull me in. I’d wonder: what am I missing? Is something broken? Or have I just — moved on?

For a while I called it a void.

The void

Void is the word you reach for when something that used to be full becomes empty. When the things that once claimed you completely — manga, anime, the particular electricity of being inside a cultural moment — quietly stop claiming you. You notice the absence before you understand it. It just feels like lack.

My outer life started to feel thin. Not painful, just — colorless. The inward life was full, always has been. But outwardly, not much happening. No forum to write in, no character to get lost inside, no story to chase week after week. The Naruto kind of devotion felt very far away.

I tried to diagnose it. Age, maybe. Busyness. The general numbness that accumulates. I looked outward for something to be absorbed by — old shows I’d never finished, manga I’d been meaning to read. Maybe I just needed the right thing to arrive.

But nothing quite arrived. And eventually I stopped waiting for it to.What I found instead

The 40s, I’m learning, are patient teachers. They don’t announce their lessons. They just keep showing up until you notice what they’re doing.

What I’ve noticed: the things that used to fill my time and attention have been leaving one by one. Not dramatically. Just quietly stepping back. And in their place — not nothing.

Space.

I thought there was a void in me. But that’s actually space. Space to create. Space to experiment. Space to realize. Space to accept new things. Space to do new things.

Same emptiness. Completely different relationship to it.

A void is something wrong. A void is absence that needs filling, a problem to solve, a lack to address. But space — space is where things arrive. Space is what you need before anything new can take root. You can’t plant something in ground that’s already crowded.

I didn’t read this somewhere. No book handed it to me, no teacher pointed the way. The realization just came, quietly, on an ordinary day. And honestly — that’s the part that delights me most.

Letting go of old forms

There will be sadness in this decade. Aging parents. Outer circumstances shifting in ways you can’t control. The 40s don’t promise ease. But they do seem to offer something — a loosening of the grip on who you were, what you loved, how you defined yourself.

Maybe it’s my time to let go of manga and anime. Not because they weren’t real, not because Naruto didn’t genuinely shape something in me — it did, it does — but because holding onto the forms of old devotion leaves no room for new ones to form.

Writing is becoming that for me. Quietly, without announcement, without me deciding it. I write every day. Not because I have to. Not because a method told me to. Because I naturally gravitate toward it, the way I once naturally showed up for a chapter every week. The pages fill. Sometimes with circles. But I show up.

Maybe that’s the new devotion. Maybe something else is coming that I can’t see yet. Either way, the space is there. And for the first time in a while, I’m not trying to fill it.

I used to think absorption was something that happened to you — a story grabbed you, a character claimed you, a cultural wave swept you up or it didn’t. Passive. Out of your hands.

Now I think maybe it’s also something you make room for. Not by seeking it out. Not by optimizing for it. Just by clearing the ground and trusting that something worth showing up for will eventually arrive.

The 40s are teaching me that. Slowly, patiently, without asking my permission.

I’m starting to think that might be enough.