Alone Times

On solitude and loneliness and how they are maybe not the same thing

Hi friends! Happy Trying-to-explain-colonization-to-your-children-with-a-turkey-leg-in-your-mouth Day! In other news, I’ve been trying to put my pandemic experience of communal living into words for some time now, and I’m proud of how this Romper piece about it all turned out. Thanks for reading :)

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Growing up, I was never alone. There were five siblings, one cousin, a bunch of tenants and stragglers and neighbors and DTF babysitters (that’s “down to fashion-a-paper-towel-roll-into-a-sword-and-have-an-epic-duel,” get your head out of the gutter!). We were always inventing some imaginary world, playing or spending hours outlining the conditions for our play (no one had much energy for Barbie after the 45-minute, painstaking divvying-up of accessories that we felt was an essential prerequisite). Our house was full of nooks and crannies, like a good english muffin, but I never thought to hide myself away in any of them. I was 12 before I had my own room, but for years, even when we were not on good terms during the daylight, I crept back into my sister's room to listen to “Bedtime Magic” with David Allen Boucher on the local smooth rock station and cuddle the night away. Alone was sitting on the bench at recess, reading a book to avoid sucking at four square. Alone was waiting to be picked up by a parent with no indication that they were ever, ever coming (this is what we did before cell phones). Alone was, I think, abandonment.

We praise children when they can entertain themselves, and throw up our hands at them when they cannot be alone, or glance worriedly in their direction when they never seem to want any company. I am pretty sure, at this point, that my kids aren't actually me, will not suffer the same hang-ups as I have but completely new, unanticipated ones, but at any rate I still feel a deep need to assure them that it's okay to want to be left alone. Probably I should stop going into their rooms all the time and asking "whatchya doin?” while they are happily entertaining themselves. Maybe I am an extrovert, after all.

My solitude mentor, the person that taught me that being alone could, when used strategically, be even better than being with other people, was my godfather, Bert. I used to visit him in Dallas, and cock my little head at how perfectly happy he was sitting for long stretches of time in the same room as his family, not saying a word. This was not how we did things at home. He was attentive, highly, in fact, and thought of things to do with a child that were fun and appropriate, though sometimes with greater expectations than most people had of a 10 year old (he also taught me how to not whine in a museum). When I was born, Bert had apparently promised to take me to Europe when I graduated high school. I imagine him, leaning over my cradle like some reverse Maleficent, professing plainly, in his quiet Texas lilt, "Sarah June, when you're all grown up, I'm going to give you some culture." He did, we did, a grown man and a seventeen-year-old girl he was not related to (he was often asked what his wife would like to order for dinner) on a picturesque tour of southern France and Italy. I did not know what to do with the quiet, with how little was expected of me socially. He woke up early, walked the towns, and was usually sitting somewhere drinking his cappuccino when I rose. We strolled side-by-side in old towns surrounded by battered fortress walls, without much conversation but also with out awkwardness. He went to bed after dinner. He fully expected that I would have things I wanted to do, time I wanted to spend on my own, but I had no schema for such a thing, no practice. I read, I walked, I wrote horrible poetry, I used my precious calling card to cry to my mother. I was lonely, sure, but at that age I was always lonely, why couldn’t I just enjoy it?

Otherwise, it simply never occurred to me, for most of my life, to be alone. In our family, or my experience of it, solitude was a punishment, though a rarely enforced one. And as I got older, and loneliness became a common tormentor, an ailment suffered often in the company of others, the last thing I wanted was to tempt it to visit me by removing myself from the safety of other bodies. I conflated solitude with loneliness. Alone is only children, who our society is convinced are very troubled but I’m pretty sure have it all figured out. As soon as you pop one kid out, you are hounded about the next one. Don’t let the prospect of further mining of your already mined body keep you from protecting your precious child from loneliness! Lone is a movie starring Johnny Depp and a sexy cannibal, which scored a 30% on the Rotten Tomato-meter. Loneliness is traipsing through an Eastern European city all winter, constantly underdressed, listening to the Shins and thinking that if only you were not alone, you wouldn't feel so damn lonely.

objectively bad

It wasn't until I had children that I started to understand how to be alone, that Bert’s puzzling demonstrations began to make sense. Sure, motherhood was also lonely, unbearably so at times, and I didn't discover the kind of comforting solitude of being alone with a baby until probably my second one. But even when things are not terrible, the constant negotiation of space and time and who can't find whose princess sunglasses and which adult will look for it, is exhausting. A few months or so after having my first child, this exhaustion began to creep on me hard, urging me to return to a self that I'd never really learned how to cultivate. Sometimes I would just feel the need to spend a day wandering around town, with no plans, or driving with no destination, solo. To me, it felt quite odd.

There was a time, in seventh grade, where I woke up before everyone else (not my dad, you can never beat an insomniac to the breakfast table) and drank tea and read in the big green high-backed chair in the living room while the sun rose, or if it was winter, considered rising. There was an energy pouring into me, something I thought you could only get from a crowd. As a mom, I remembered that feeling, but didn't know how I could possibly wake up early enough to have the place to myself. When my first child turned one, I went on a three-day silent meditation retreat, despite having been unanimously picked last in a hypothetical "silent meditation retreat" draft amongst my siblings at a family vacation (this is what we do for fun). I missed my kid, like, deep in my bones (and also my boobs). I was overwhelmed. But I was not bored, and not lonely, not at all. Something about having children, maybe just the young ones, protected me from this. Most likely, I would never feel that deep, Shins-level loneliness again.

the loneliest man on earth

Last week, the gods smiled so damn hard upon me that I got to go to Mexico, without my family, but with a group of women, most of whom I did not know well. Historically, groups of women make me highly uncomfortable. I am both worried that I will have to do things with them and that I will be excluded from the things they want to do. But this group was different, or maybe just older (I include myself in that appraisal), and I arrived realizing that I had no obligations to anyone else, no responsibility but to use these precious hours in which my husband did six bedtimes in a row and wiped every shitty ass and responded to every request for a "bedtime banana" count.

In Mexico, I heard myself utter the words "I think I just need to spend some time alone" when invited on a trip to see the nearest Mayan ruins. I braced myself for some consequence, external or internal, I don’t know, but it never came. I biked on my own to the ruins. I asked people for directions. I went to the bathroom when I had to pee. I bought a drink when I was thirsty. It's the little things.

On the plane ride home, as we ascended, the evening storm turned the clouds into an immersive Renaissance painting, or, for any young people reading this, a Museum of Ice Cream exhibit, white and pink and stupid pretty. Because there was turbulence, which I hate, I did this visualization, where I am the only person traveling in a submarine at the bottom the ocean, barreling along towards my destination. People I love wave to me from outside my little windows. Cartoon fish smile at me. I opened and closed my eyes, shifting back and forth from those epic clouds to the ocean floor, feeling like the only person in the g-damned world. There's a lot I have to learn about truly being alone. Maybe I don’t need it as much as Bert did, but I think I do need it. I do not do well with routines, with what most people would call developing a "practice," but I think this solitude thing is a muscle to be strengthened, or, perhaps, it’s already strong enough.

What’s your relationship to solitude? Teach me the ways.

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Also, this:

If that turkey leg is really jumbling up your brilliant explanations of why we celebrate the genocide of our nation’s first people and the severing of our culture from a previously-symbiotic relationship with the earth, these things might help:

• Kelly Clancy discussing kids and Thanksgiving in her newsletter, Everyday Activism: “As I’ve mentioned before, my goal is to approach the topic of indigenous culture throughout the year, not timed with holidays we’re trying to atone for.”

• How to Reteach Thanksgiving from Little Feminists

• You won’t finish this by Thursday, but I just read Julietta Singh’s fabulous essay, The Breaks, and find her modeling of these things devastating and also useful.