What To Do With Loneliness
I’ve been meaning, for a while now, to tell you the story of how this blog came to be. Better late than never, right?
I got the idea last year, during that first pandemic fall of 2020, while Andrew and I were out in Montauk for October. We spent the month posted up in a ramshackle Airbnb, and it was a beautiful month (foliage, beach walks, farm stands) but summer was inarguably over, and by late October, it was way too cold for things like outdoor dining. In other words, the looming reality of that long Covid winter was starting to make itself known. During that time, I was working on my next novel. Andrew was working, too, but the rhythms of our days were very different. He spent the whole day in meetings, talking to other people, recreating the experience of an office on the computer screen. Writing a novel, on the other hand. It’s always been a very solitary endeavor. It’s just you, the page, the characters, for months or years at a time, and those characters never want to Zoom with you. To break up the solitude, when the weather cooperated, I would sometimes go to the cafe in town and work at one of their outdoor tables for a while. Exchanging a few words with the barista, overhearing other people’s conversations, it gave me just enough human interaction to allow me to feel human. But on rainy days, I worked at home. Those were exceptionally quiet days.
On a Friday at the end of one particularly rainy and housebound week, I had to bring our car to the garage in town to get the headlight fixed. The mechanic was a nice guy, and we got to chatting. We stood next to the car while he changed the bulb, and let me tell you, it was delightful. We spent five or ten minutes talking about nothing. The weather, the tourists, the price of real estate. Meaningless chitchat! I hadn’t realized how badly I’d been missing it! That night, as Andrew and I were driving back from dinner, I started telling him about my conversation with the mechanic. Here’s what he had to say about the deer problem! About the housing market! I was bouncy and animated, like a little kid back from her first day of kindergarten, bragging about her new friend. I could actually feel the delight coursing through my body. With a gentle and loving laugh, Andrew said: wow, this was really the highlight of your week, huh? And I laughed and said: yeah, it was!
And then I sat with that for a moment. And then this made me feel sort of depressed, and sad, and I began to cry.
In the days that followed, I allowed myself to feel (maybe for the first time since the pandemic had begun, seven months earlier) just how lonely and isolating this Covid thing really was. Even though I have a partner, and family, and friends, and I love them deeply—even with that, loneliness was still a real factor. I couldn’t snap my fingers and make Covid go away. But I also knew that I had to do something, I had to change something. I couldn’t sustain myself on those meager scraps. So what could I do? How could I, given the constrictions of the pandemic, bring back into my daily routine that necessary, heart-expanding experience of intersecting with other people’s lives?
That’s when I thought of the idea for this blog. Rarely am I seized with an idea that I know, with deep gut-level certainty, I must carry out. This was one of them. A few days after that encounter at the garage, I wrote my first blog post. It’s been one of the best things I’ve done for myself in the last year-plus. This blog has given me so much! Chances to verbalize these long-simmering thoughts, but more importantly: chances to exchange emails or texts or calls with old friends and new, to talk about books and food and TV shows, to reconnect with people thousands of miles away. It broke up the quiet. It kept me sane during that long Covid winter, during the shaky transitions of spring and summer. This writing is much more personal than anything I’ve done before; and I’ve loved it. I’ve found so much joy in it. In the end, I have loneliness to thank for pushing me into this discovery.
But that said—I haven’t written here in a while, not since Labor Day, and I think I know why that is. The fall of 2021 is very different from the fall of 2020. Things have gotten busier. I’m seeing people again. Lunches, dinners, coffees. Museums, movie theaters, parties. I run into friends on the street. I see people around the neighborhood. New York City is lively! The world has made herself visible again, and I am a part of that world. I feel enmeshed again in the slipstreams of other people’s lives (and my god, how grateful I am for that). We are a long ways yet from normal, but the small collisions of everyday life have been coming back.
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That tiny little breakdown last October, after the car mechanic conversation (sidenote because, lol: that poor mechanic has no idea how much I still talk about him): the truth is that, pandemic or no pandemic, it probably would have come eventually. When I plunged into this full-time writing thing, I wasn’t just changing career tracks; I was changing the deepest rhythms and routines of my days. Even before we ever heard of this stupid virus, I was feeling those occasional bursts of loneliness, of realizing that staying inside and writing all day wasn’t going to be enough. Eventually I was going to have to address this. The pandemic merely accelerated it. But from the outset I’ve loved writing, and I’ve loved the freedom of it. I’ve never wanted to give that up. So it was going to be up to me—it was always going to be up to me—to figure out my own solution. My own apparatuses. It has taken me a while (over three years!) to find these. Not merely the apparatuses required for productivity, for writing and reading and other book-stuff, but also the apparatuses required for the fuller, harder-to-define experience of living.
This blog has been part of that. At the outset, this blog served a very specific purpose, i.e., to keep myself from crying in various Montauk parking lots. (I mean, you do have to laugh about this stuff. It’s FUNNY.) But I guess what I’m trying to say, in very long-winded fashion, is that I no longer need this blog to serve that specific purpose. I feel that, for the moment at least, I have figured out how to navigate that particular stretch of water. So this blog, then. I love having this outlet! I don’t want to give it up. But now what shape does it take? I’ve been thinking about this. And part of the reason I haven’t written in a while is that … I don’t know! I still don’t know. And rather than trying to change this, to invent some arbitrary answer, I’d like to embrace the non-plan of this plan. To let it be a little lighter, a little freer, as we say goodbye to this marathon pandemic year.
Last month I watched the Beatles documentary Get Back (I am fully obsessed; if you haven’t watched it yet please do so immediately so that we can talk about it), and one of the things I loved best was watching them constantly play. Play in the way that little kids play. The Beatles were in that studio in order to write new songs and record a new album, but so much of the joyful creativity happened when they weren’t working. When they were just bullshitting, riffing, goofing off.
I write in order to think, and I share the writing in order to make the thought real. Your existence holds me accountable. So let’s consider this my jumpstart on 2022 resolutions. I am here, I am still here, and I have precisely zero answers, but so what! In 2022, I am finding the joy in this. I am going to let myself become whatever I need to become. Happy holidays, my friends. We made it. I’m so grateful for you. Have a safe, cozy end to the year. See you on the flipside.