On Loneliness and Despair
and making a beautiful future, anyway
Despite having (regrettably!) never seen a single episode of Project Runway, I’m a huge fan of Tim Gunn, and endlessly reference his mantra passed to me by my bestie, “Make it work!”
I am folding laundry in the middle of the afternoon some day in May. My dad is making me laugh inside of pain in a way he alone can do. “You know,” he says, one hour and thirty minutes into our phone session, “Profound loneliness is just part of it. All of it. No matter who you are. When you get to feeling down about not having a tribe outside of yourself to offer the children on holidays, my suggestion is this. Go get half a dozen cardboard cut-outs, you know the kind they have at like, a car dealership or whatever. Wrestle the cut outs into some chairs around the house! Make your own tribe! You have to laugh! You know, you gotta work with what you got. Kids, this is what we are working with, I know it ain’t much, but look - there’s plenty for us to eat!” He is making a joke while making a point: get creative, my girl.
Nothing has flattened my spirit more than losing the village I thought I had, simply by getting divorced. I want to believe it’s a hard pill I need to swallow and just get on with, but the truth is I feel it creeping into the basement of my psyche, carving messages onto the walls that read, “You are disposable. You are unlovable. You are untouchable.” There comes a point where it’s too exhausting to explain, the agony of feeling abandoned during the most difficult point of your life, the desperation I feel for tender acceptance. I see that my brain is trained to look for evidence anytime it can to support this idea that I’m foolish and therefore going to get thrown away. I have to actively pull the leash on the thought like I would for a distracted puppy. Back over here, where we don’t assume the worst, mind. In the desert of despair, loneliness singes its brand on your heart. It is a rite of passage. And then, you either sink or you learn the ropes of loving yourself back to life.
I make myself my favorite sandwich: a toasted everything bagel with mayo, dijon, sharp cheddar and peppered turkey. I tidy the kitchen sink, because how the kitchen looks for me alone still matters, I have decided. I speak softly to the cat. When I finish folding laundry I tell myself it is time to get out of the house or I’ll be horizontal sooner than I want. I visit a friend and walk through the ravine with her, tagging along to yoga, smelling the pungence of 20 people moving quietly in a warm room together. “Now let it all out with an exhale,” the teacher says, and the collective rush of our breath in the room washes over me.
Being with other people feels nice. At the end of class I loosen my whole body in savasana, letting my hips release into the ground, deciding to be cradled by the floor. In this moment, that intimacy is enough. The room is so delicately silent I wonder if we have all floated away. The teacher comes by to rub oil softly on my temples and between my eyebrows. I am touched by the tenderness of what it feels like for a woman to care for me in this small way. I think, maybe I am going to be ok.
Recently I listened to a podcast with Maggie Smith who described the sensation of losing an entire future she thought she had in the midst of her divorce. Upon further examination she decided that actually, what she had lost was only an idea of the future she had made up for herself. Perceived, not realized. None of it was actually real, or guaranteed to her in any way. Things fall apart. People change their minds. People die, move away, lose their jobs, have affairs, get distracted, and so on, and this isn’t meant only in romantic terms. Neatly put, we are not always the chief executive officer of our lives in the way we think we are. Often we are cornered into pivoting. The fragility of what we think is coming down the line is often lost on us.
While that is undeniably disconcerting, it is also undeniably a certainty, something we must be willing to accept, if we’d like to engage with life with our big girl pants on. I think about this as I wallow sometimes in the ways my life feels clunky and unclear at the moment. Life is clunky. Life is unclear. I see now that a life’s work is cutting away the vines creeping around our necks, choking out our imagination of what could still be. Pruning back vines that are cutting off not just our resilience but our creativity to make a warm and satisfying home for ourselves in an unfamiliar moment, in an unfamiliar place. As Maggie Smith said, you could (STILL!) make this place beautiful.
Thank you for supporting my writing! You can support me by becoming a paid subscriber, sharing my work with your friends, and following me online @yourknowing. I offer one on one consulting sessions for women going through difficult transitions, as well as selling my own line of paper goods and curated second hand at Marigold Curated. Thanks for being here. Sending you all the love as you navigate the insanity of being alive in the world. XO, Jolie