From Nothing to Something: The Stories We Write in the Desert

There is nothing. A blank page. Empty space where a story could be.

And then I write.

Water in the Desert

Suddenly, where there was nothing, there is something. Words that didn’t exist now breathe. A narrative takes shape. What lived only in the formless realm of possibility becomes real, tangible, shareable. The nothing has become something to me, and potentially to many others.

This is the quiet miracle of creation, something from nothing, by the simple act of beginning.

But here’s what I’ve learned about the relationship between nothing and something, between emptiness and meaning. The desert seasons of our lives, those bare, difficult stretches where it feels like nothing is happening, nothing is growing, nothing matters, are often where the most essential somethings take root.

I tend to measure life by the oases, the achievements, the abundant times, the moments when everything blooms. Those are the stories I tell at parties, the highlights I post, the chapters I’m proud to share. But the desert? I want to skip over that. I treat it like narrative dead space, something to endure until I get to the good part.

What if we’ve been reading it wrong?

The desert teaches what abundance cannot. In the stripping away, in the long stretches of what feels like nothing, we learn who we are when everything else is gone. We discover what we’re actually made of. We find out what we truly need versus what we merely wanted. We develop endurance, discernment, depth.

The desert doesn’t feel like something while I’m in it. It feels like nothing….nothing working out, nothing going right, nothing to show for my efforts. But it’s doing profound work beneath the surface, the way a seed buried in dark soil might wonder if anything will ever come of this nothing.

Every story worth telling has desert chapters. Every person worth knowing has walked through their own wasteland. And if you dismiss those seasons as meaningless, as nothing, you miss the very places where you became something.

The blank page is not the enemy of the story. It’s where the story begins.

The silence is not the absence of music. It’s the space that makes the notes matter.

The desert is not where meaning goes to die. It’s where it’s refined, concentrated, purified down to what’s essential and true.

So yes, at first there is nothing. No story, no meaning, no visible growth. But I stay. I write. I wait. I walk through the bare landscape with attention, with honesty, with willingness to learn what only emptiness can teach.

And then, looking back, I realize, the desert wasn’t nothing after all. It was something becoming. The most important something I’d ever write. A way through the desert.

Where Light Bleeds Through

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Author Melissa Saulnier