Connecting, again
The last time I posted here it was October 2019. Life wasn’t good, and nobody knew then what we were heading into.
At the time, I had a blossoming sense of horror about the future. Like a flower dropped in water, unfolding its petals slowly, it felt as if something malevolent, a dark and cancerous sense of disconnection, was amplifying.
I wrote (but never posted) about this feeling. I was in the drug store, listening to the piped-in Top 40 music, trying to find something I needed, overwhelmed by all the choices. There were too many of these unimportant items, too many different and unnecessary types of things, and no one who passed in the narrow aisles looked me in the eye or spoke to me. I felt the weight of the worst parts of capitalism and technology — greed, materialism, waste, people somewhere in joyless offices making joyless decisions — teetering above me on those shelves, threatening to fall down and crush me. What I felt was evil (yes, evil), gathering power and space and speed.
It felt like as a society we had finally hit a wall: we had reached some sort of event horizon of disregard for what is essential. There was too much bullshit, too much distraction, too little of what matters, which is the light and the love of other human beings when we can connect with them honestly.
Then COVID happened. The days were long and silent. Even sound seemed to die. The audioscape of the city reduced to almost-nothingness, to a whisper. Delivery people came and went, the elevator bell outside my apartment dinging softly.
The longing for human contact, for some, did not become apparent immediately. For the first few months, I thought those complaining about being isolated were a bit soft. I could understand their complaints, but they didn’t seem to apply to me. Not having to leave the house and interact with a society I had found increasingly toxic felt like a strange, golden specter of unhinged freedom. For the first time in my life, I had a socially acceptable — actually, it was mandated — reason to never deal with other human beings face to face, but for the barest essentials.
As a single person living alone at the time, I felt frighteningly okay. I was better than okay. I felt spiritual, empowered. Each day I participated in an online yoga class. I watched the sun set and meditated in front of a small porcelain statue of Buddha. I read Man’s Search for Meaning and texted with friends about how our situation could really be so much worse (of course this was true, but I was also avoiding loss, and grief). I bought things online and returned them in their self-adhesive packages.
High on my own fumes of self-sufficiency, I thought, “I can do this forever.” After the lockdowns lifted, I rarely ventured out of the protective bubble I’d created.
Then, my body started breaking down. I noticed strange afflictions that moved around and came upon me without warning or sense. Stabbing pains in my chest. An ice pick sensation in my head. Dizziness. Hives. Tooth pain. Blurred vision. Burning in my arms. Burning in my fingers, face, nose. Numbness in my extremities. The sensation that my throat was slowly closing. I woke up in the middle of the night with the left side of my body completely numb. Totally lucid, I knew I wasn’t having a stroke. I shut my eyes, scrunched my face into my pillow, and asked, in silence, for help.
The fatigue was all consuming. Formerly a fit person, I began strategically placing items around my 600 square foot apartment: rather than walk ten extra feet to put something away, I would plan my trips along the length of my 30-foot cell. I’d pile laundry near the hall so I could take it to the washer on a trip to the bathroom. There were piles everywhere. I was always stepping around the evidence of my own destruction.
There were many calls with doctors and specialists and several trips to the ER. Was it long COVID? Some other unexplained illness? Grief over my mother’s death? Anxiety? A little bit of all of these?
No one could really say. I kept googling and googling, scouring the internet for an answer. I read so many health and anxiety subreddits my browser began to query me as to whether I was a bot. Like Narcissus gazing at his own reflection or the Nietzschean abyss, I was compelled to search for meaning in the pool of my own demise. Where else would I seek respite, if not online? The world out there was increasingly composed of the world in here, or so I thought, and I could hold it in my hands, and it would give me information, distraction from my worries and fears, connection, a sense of belonging. It would give me a something I so deeply needed to hold on to.
The crushing chest pain came for me one night when a man I was seeing stayed over at my apartment. He put on a t-shirt and was washing up; he came back to bed with his face still wet, tiny beads of water clinging to the tips of his hair and tracing his forehead. He laid down next to me and put his phone on the bed. In the dark, I nestled my cheek into the smooth skin of his chest. At least if I die now, I’m not alone, I thought.
As I am writing this, I realize that for my entire life I have always been terrified of people; of their opinions, of what they would think of me, of the things they did and said, of the unpredictability of their behaviour, of the senseless cruelty and emotional numbness I have seen. But as much as I have been terrified of people, I have also loved and craved them. I suspect my fear obscured my ability to see. I wonder if this is true for many of us.
During the pandemic, I shut down. I turned away, thinking I could make it on my own. If you are like me and the world has a times felt like a cold and hostile place, if you’ve been hurt in past, if you carry trauma, this decision becomes understandable. And I do not judge anyone who makes the choice, when faced with what is out there, to build self-protective walls.
It was my body that told me that I needed other people. It told me I needed not only their words, but their physical presence, their touch, the look in their eyes when they look at you, the sound of their laughter that can catch your own secret, inside self and draw it out, the expressions and gestures that are so beautifully human and can reach toward our hearts.
Love cannot be manufactured in isolation. We need connection. Online communities are wonderful and they have also saved me in different ways (and I hope this newsletter can become a kind of community), but we must also have the full, unpredictable reality of in-person human contact. And I think some of us can underestimate just how much of this contact we need. It sounds incredibly obvious, but it was not to me at the time. I really was convinced I was better off on my own, living in a world of my own making, where nothing and no one could harm me. Maybe this a common way for people to get lost, how they end up completely out of touch with reality. They give in to the need to be in control. A relationship you can hold in the palm of your hand, one that occurs through a screen, allows for a degree of intellectual sovereignty.
I’ve tried, so many times, to find my place with people, and for years I felt as if I had failed. I had failed to find a place that was true to myself, without giving up important parts of myself, without lying or pretending about who I really am. I realize now this is a process. And in honest effort, there is a place of truth. I’m changing, because, over the course of our lives, to grow into who we are, change is required. And in that changing, a soft place emerges. A threshold opens for others to cross and come toward you.
I’m at a co-working space right now. It’s 5 o’clock. Someone just brewed coffee. It smells rich and pungent and decadent — it smells real. The city is darkening, and the lights are coming on in bright empty offices. A siren is screaming across King Street, and the floorboards of this old building creak whenever someone walks by. I went into the kitchen earlier and the members here were having some sort of happy hour; empty martini glasses crowded the sink, their single olive eyes looking up at me. I was too self-conscious to say hello, too lacking in courage I would have once summoned by liquid means to extend myself outside my own boundaries. But the impulse was there, and it is growing inside of me, and it is good.
I want to be the kind of person who has a home with others and who helps others find a home. I want to know others deeply, as much as this is possible. I want these things almost more than I want to write. I am beginning to suspect they are the same thing, from the same essential impulse.
I hope this newsletter can be a kind of home for anyone who is on this road of knowing themselves and others more deeply. In the onslaught of mind-altering social media, algorithmic love, artificial intelligence, influencers, celebrity culture brainwashing, plastic surgery that tells us we should all look like similar approximations of a vaguely human face, we must reach out of ourselves to meet each other. We must fight to preserve what is human. We must fight to keep connecting, in a way that is meaningful and true.