Reflections
It’s been a long time.
What feels like an eternity of being sequestered in my home has actually been about six months. Sitting in this very spot, typing, just like now. Day after day I assume my position, I guess you could call it a habit at this point.
When my sister and I were children, we would often mimic our grandmother’s most predictable behaviors. Usually, this looked something like sitting at the bar in her kitchen, thumbing through the tv guide and taking a cool drag off her Salem every now and then. It always looked like this every time I sat in her chair. My ten year old self, hands fanned out and resting on the bar in front of me, peering down the bridge of my nose at the invisible booklet resting in my palms, then taking a puff from an invisible cigarette. That’s where she was, day after day. At least, that was how we thought of her. Now my own children mimic me in a similar fashion, but instead of chain smoking and looking through a tiny magazine, I’m sitting at the dining room table and typing. Always typing. “This is what you look like, mom!” They say it with such pride, like they’ve discovered the secret to my existence. Then they furrow their brows, hunch over, and their tiny fingers begin to type feverishly on a keyboard that isn’t actually there.
It always feels like some sort of accomplishment when you discover a new intimate detail about someone, when you’ve got someone figured out. The great conquest of knowing and getting to know a person. And the truly thrilling part of this is that you’ll never stop getting to know someone, if you know them for long enough. I feel fairly certain when I say that I’ll never truly know even myself. I’m always surprising myself, showing up in ways I never would have expected. Then, once I grind my way through the existential dread of not knowing who this strange person is that I’ve become, and once I’ve finally grown accustomed to my new ways of existing, I go and change again. Isolation has been no exception to this rule. If anything, I think it’s accelerated the process.
Aristotle said that nature abhors a vacuum.
There are two points in the timeline of my life that I can point to which had an irrevocable impact on who I have become as a person, and both were times of deep isolation.
The first being the time between my pregnancy and around two and a half years after me and my partners daughters were born. I was a first time mother with twins. At that point in my life, I had said [a figurative] farewell to many friends, as we diverged down different paths in our lives. It was an incredibly lonely time which yielded a lot of pain. I had the girls, and together we explored our beloved City and went on many adventures. But it was still deeply lonely. It was also a pivotal time in my life as a woman, not just as a mother. I found myself returning to work, then community college, and eventually university. Yet beyond all of these accomplishements, I am most impressed by my ability to survive. I am most impressed by my ability to extrapolate even the tiniest sliver of light in a dark and lonely place. Stuck within the same four walls day after day, year after year, with nobody for company but two helpless babies. I didn’t drive and we were broke, which complicated matters. Times were hard. I found a strength and tenacity I didn’t know I had. Perhaps it was there all along and I would have realized it eventually. But I can’t help but think that my time spent at home those three years helped in facilitating the process along.
The second point in my life, from which I will no doubt emerge irrevocably changed, is currently unfolding. What’s funny to me about these two points in time, the present moment in particular, is the daft contrast between how little is going on within my immediate bubble (ie: home) and how much is going on within my own mind. Constant chatter. Before isolation, I was still a mother. But I was also a student about to enter my junior year at university. I was a climber. I was a friend. I sang my heart out once a week at my favorite bar’s karaoke night. I took bus rides and train rides across the city to see movies by myself, ate in restaurants, went shopping. I did stuff. These things helped to quiet the chatter. If Aristotle is right, and based on personal experiences he is, the abrupt loss of all of this stuff that I used to do had to be replaced with something. It’s science!
The more I sit and really reflect on how isolation has effected me in the past, and how it’s effecting me again now, the more I realize that none of that other stuff really mattered. Yes, I enjoy doing those things. But they’re activities. They were never a part of my identity. Much like before, when I was so surprised by the inner strength I possessed, an inner strength which I’ve no doubt had all along, now I am seeing these new pieces to the puzzle that make up me. But are they that new? Or have they been there all along, waiting for the right moment to fully emerge.
It’s easy to see the losses, the tangible things that seem to be ripped right out of our hands. But nature won’t allow these spaces to remain empty for long. I marvel at my strength. I awe over my ferocity. My losses will yeild me gains, and by harvests end I’m sure the reaping will be plentiful.