12. The pleasures and perils of solitude.
Greetings from springtime where everything is immediate, urgent, and possible, where everything is blooming all at once and the leaves are leafing and the streets smell like daffodils and cigarettes. Other things the streets smell like right now include: pizza, bleach, sour milk, piss, and a slippery mess of tulip magnolia petals decaying on the sidewalk (which kind of smells astringent, like black tea). This week, there was a 3-alarm junkyard fire in Hunting Park, and a lady walked straight into a freshly poured concrete sidewalk outside my office and immediately sank in up to her hips (after pulling her out, the workers bravely went back into the quagmire to retrieve her shoes).
The first time this year that I felt the sun blazing down on my back, it felt like it had been a thousand years, and it changed me forever from the inside out, just like it does every year. I was laid out on a thrift store pashmina spread over a patch of grass reading a book in Rittenhouse Square, feeling positively Parisian among the rows of park benches and lawns packed with people of every ilk, eating, drinking, chatting, playing music, playing chess, doing nothing; teenage girls in waist-length box braids recording TikTok dances while Franciscan Friars in cream-colored robes stroll past; from stage left, an old man walks by pushing a bicycle with a basket full of flowers. Springtime feels like my lucky day, like I’m landing on the subway platform just as my train arrives, like magic.
The “Free Haircuts for the Homeless” guy is out again, with a PA blasting inspirational music behind a banner and a chair set up on the median in the middle of South Broad Street. Even though it makes me a little itchy how he puts his clients on display like that, I still tear up every time I walk by. The “Bible Truths” ladies are out again, too, and I can tell it’s them because I usually notice their stylish fit-and-flare mid-calf floral print dresses before I notice their kiosks of religious tracts. Like the people from the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and UNICEF, and everyone asking for a dollar for a bite to eat, I aggressively avert my eyes and adjust my earbuds as I brisk past; if I had a conversation with everyone trying to get my attention on the sidewalk, I’d never make it home from work.
To be honest, part of what I love about being brand new in a big city is that I don’t have to have a conversation with anyone on my way home from work; I don’t know anybody and can overtly ignore everyone; I can go about my business- at the grocery store, at the bank, at the post office, on the subway- in complete anonymity, together with 1.5 million strangers, everyone else minding their own business, too. It’s not that life in public with strangers is hostile or unfriendly, quite the opposite, it’s just that there’s no obligation or expectation. It feels like a massive relief of an enormous amount of pressure that I didn’t know I was carrying all my life until it was gone- pressure to please, pressure to perform, pressure to tend, befriend, and care for every person, place, and thing that crossed my path.
Of course, I have many relationships that, happily, include reciprocity, caretaking, and expectations: I interact with dozens of co-workers and clients every day, I keep up with my friends, I live with two people I love and whose love has been a healing force in my life and I have never actually (ever!) lived alone. But neither have I ever spent more time in solitude than I do now. It’s hard to say if my solitude began when I moved to the city, because that process began in the wake of a great loss, which was shortly after the start of a pandemic, which took place right after I quit my job, which happened only a few months after I quit drinking, which itself came on the heels of ceasing communication with my whole, cacophonous family of origin. Month over month, year after year, things just got quieter, and quieter, and quieter, and then they stayed quiet for a very long time.
I have equated my solitude with my healing, and, as lonely and narrow as that road has been, it has been so rich with reward. Among many other gifts, from my solitude has emerged my current writing practice, which, without regard to whether it is “good” or whether people read it, is objectively life-giving for me and I can’t believe my luck that I’ve finally built a life where I spend one whole day a week writing. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about this essay about healing in isolation by rayne fisher quann aka internet princess:
It’s an intoxicating idea in part because isolated healing is a study in false negatives. When relationships are made difficult by traumas, anxieties, and neuroses — and when those issues are triggered as you navigate complicated relationships — being alone really can feel a lot like being cured. Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering. It is ideal, of course, for us to work to understand those conflicts and thereby make them less destructive to ourselves and others, but we can’t make those feelings disappear; nothing real can have contact without friction. If you’ve been encouraged to define a healthy life as a frictionless one, I think it may be inevitable that a life devoid of contact starts to feel like healing.
First of all, how is she writing like this at 21 years old? [pinches cheek and shakes it] You’re going places, kiddo! But truly, of the many salient points she makes in this essay, the one that hit me like a ton of bricks is that instagram therapy culture encourages us to “sever relationships that don’t serve you and invest your newfound time and energy into self-improvement,” which, taken to it’s logical conclusion, means that all that is left are the transactional “relationships” that you pay for: your therapist, your aesthetician, your DoorDash driver, your barista, your life coach. It’s a brilliant takedown of the self-optimization industrial complex, and it has spawned lots of conversation in my little corner of the algorithm, along with more click-baity articles like “Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?”
Obviously, I believe strongly in the benefits of therapy, and I think most people haven’t even come within sneezing distance of a healthy boundary and would greatly benefit from setting one or several. But what I keep coming back to is the piece that we’ve somehow come to the collective conclusion that healing can only happen in solitude, when it can also so beautifully happen in relationship, in family, in community. The problem with this premise, however, is that it relies on the assumption that we have healthy and functional familial, communal, and societal systems in which to do so, which we so obviously do not, and which is the source of so many of our woundings in the first place. Broken chicken, broken egg.
I greatly appreciate the nuance being brought into this discourse, however, and I wish to invite a both/and perspective: it seems to me that having an interior life has never felt so out of reach for so many- and therefore has never been more crucial, while at the same time, we have to stop fragilizing (new favorite word I learned from my therapist!) ourselves and each other in order to build resilient relationships where we can heal together, where we can have rupture and then repair, where our bonds are not so tenuous that they snap under pressure.
Sometimes I’m afraid that my most likable self died in sobriety. Sober me is fussy, self-conscious, awkward, I notice everything. But that’s actually the real me, not the performance of me, and as trauma therapist Kobe Campbell says (on instagram, lol), “healing is not becoming the best version of yourself. Healing is letting the worst version of yourself be loved. So many of us have turned healing into becoming this super perfect version of ourselves. That is bondage. That is anxiety waiting to happen. Healing is saying: every single version of me deserves love, deserves tenderness, deserves grace. ”
The fact is, retreating from social life did relieve a great deal of my anxiety, and allowed my interior world to flourish, along with my closest relationships. For me personally, all my life, I used people-pleasing and keeping busy (and drinking, duh) to dull my own anxiety, and in the quiet of solitude, I found a safe place to unpack that, and now my life looks very different, and I’m simply much more introverted than ever before. I don’t feel as glamorous as I once did (in fact, as a middle-aged woman, I feel downright invisible) but there’s a freedom in that, and most crucially, I no longer feel a need to escape from my own life.
On Easter Sunday, as my son played frisbee with his cousins, dad, and uncle on the wide floodplain behind his grandparents’ house, and his friend sat with his back against a tree, video chatting with his girlfriend, I found myself walking away from the crowd, not towards anything in particular, but following the dog towards the honking geese by the creek. She and I arrived at the edge of the wood and, without telling the others, ducked behind a curtain of privet, stepped into a small glen, dappled with sunlight; immediately a fat turtle plonked into the water. Just as I zeroed in on his shell swimming under the surface of the creek, I heard another noise and turned my head to see five white-tailed deer startle and bound away down the path. The deer, in turn, startled a great raptor (could it have been a Barred Owl? I could have sworn by the color and the markings) that rustled above me, then swooped down and away, beating her mighty wings out of the trees above the clearing, following the deer along the path.
I was breathless, elated. Walking further through the bog, a wide bloom of yellow trout lilies, other spring ephemerals, and something giant and green and stalky, like bok choy, pushing up urgently from the good green earth. It was good to be with people, and I’m so glad I walked away.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️
Home
Yesterday I made this lemon/lime tart for our dinner guests and it made a delightful breakfast today too:
Like most recipes I bake, I substituted the all-purpose flour in the recipe for GF flour with a little bit of cornmeal. I find the cornmeal cuts the gloopiness of the GF flour and gives it a more toothsome texture. Here’s a gift link to the recipe on New York Times Cooking.
The World
More on the theme of being a hermit, but, like, female: “To be alone, after all, is to admit to that rare quality: a contentment with one’s self.”
We watched the entire series of Beef on Netflix this week and it was gorgeous and hilarious and timely and I highly recommend.
A great post by Holly Whitaker referencing these two quotes from Pema Chodron in The Wisdom of No Escape:
“When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they’re going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It’s a bit like saying, ‘If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.’
“Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.”
The Hermit
The Hermit represents the light of wisdom within each of us. The Hermit is the inner voice that can only be heard in silence and solitude- the follower of the contemplative life, which is as old as culture itself. The Hermit can also represent wise counsel in the form of another: a guide, therapist, or mentor who lights the path ahead of you.
A Poem
This has always been one of my favorites, and seems timely as a (belated) Easter poem, but still apropos of spring. Bonus, it’s also a Halloween poem! With apologies to everyone who was friends with me on Facebook when I used to share this poem like every 6 weeks:
Good Time Jesus
by James Tate
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
I hope your springtime is bringing you renewal, connection, and healing solitude, all in proper measure, all in good time.
⚔️❤️ Jodi