4: The anatomy of being alone

The things is; Living your truth is not the easiest feat in the world. That might be true for any truth. Maybe a little bit more, when it goes against what the world sees, when it looks at you. Looking at me, a 41 year old woman from Copenhagen, Denmark the world would expect me to be married, have 2,4 kids, a job, a house, a car, a dog. I had none of those things. A job once. Yes. The rest, never happened. 

And now I was even leaving the last pretenses behind, the last few things that could tell the world, oh, but look, at least she has an apartment! There's a mortgage! The rest will come. Somehow that seemed to be a general assumption; Just wait long enough and the rest will come. As if ticking off the boxes of a secure middle class existence was the ultimate goal of happiness. Maybe not happiness, but at least recognizable-ness. You are like us. 

And of course I wanted all of that. No one ever wants to be the odd one out. I have no beef with the middle class. Life in the summer night garden of a house filled with love is one of the most beautiful things, I know.

It was just... something else was calling stronger.

And it wasn't exactly as if any of the 'normal' life things were just around the corner anyway. I mean, I was chronically ill, had been for 11 years, no career even remotely within sight, since I couldn't do any hours that was worth a damn. I was busy trying to find my feet most days. Not exactly the best selling points on any dating site either. So the great love and the 2,4 kids wasn't exactly in the pipe lines.

In short I was under no delusions that this was it. I was going to grow old in that apartment, listening to new neighbors having sex and the upstairs neighbor being drunk for the rest of my days. It didn't exactly help with my depression. 

Then I had walked the Camino de Santiago. Saint James' Way. The ancient pilgrimage road in Spain that takes you straight across two mountain ranges and the entirety of Northern Spain on your own two feet. 

One day I just up and went. No planning, no maps, no idea of what I was doing. Turns out you can simply take a bus to the starting point. Funny how that works; The things you are the most certain of are completely impossible for you to do, turns out aren't. You just have to take the first step. The rest will follow one by one. Might not be pretty or look like anything in the movies. 

But I learned maybe the most important thing anyone can learn doing a six week hike while very ill and alone:

Any journey gets done by taking the next step. 

That's all you need to know ever. You don't have to know where it ends. Even how it middles. You just have to think of that one next step. Nothing else. 

Really it was a teaching of the heart: Stop the planning, stop being so busy wanting to know it all with your head that you drown out the voice that already knows in your heart. Just become quiet. And listen.

It was an epic and truly weird journey, six weeks, across mountain ranges and with late night dances by Catholic priests. I had never been to happy in my entire life. Never felt that strong a sense of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

On the Way people fell in love, had epiphanies of their life’s purposes, changed their jobs, their homes, their everything. The Camino does that. It changes peoples lives. But when I was done, when I stood at the finishing point, all I felt was a sense of disappointment. Now it was over, and I was the same.

I went back to Copenhagen, Denmark. Opened the door to my apartment, and just knew: I don’t live here anymore. This is not my home. This is the place of a stranger.

(Truly for a moment I had a pang of fright, I thought I had really just opened the door to a neighbors apartment, not my own. It took my a while to breathe again).

A few months later the apartment was sold. The apartment I had been told was impossible to sell. Gone in a week from signing the papers. Then most of my things were gone. I sold the big things, or gave them away. Turned out that the only things I wanted to keep could fit into a tiny locker of 1x1x1 meters in a storage facility. It was mostly books, to be honest, that still makes me laugh. Then again to me not many things could possibly be more important than books. 

The rest got stored in a barn in the countryside. If it were to be stolen, it wouldn’t really make a difference, nothing was expensive anyway.

Turned out the Camino had taught me all I needed to know:

All you really need is your backpack and your two feet.

Then I took that backpack, so small it fit into the overhead compartment of the plane, and left the rest behind.

It was the scariest thing I had ever done. And the most wildly extremely freeing. I did what everybody said was insane. But to me it was the only way to sanity.

And now I had been homeless for a few weeks. It was freedom mixed with being unsettled, this morning it was strong:

The cold came the instant I moved my naked feet from under the covers. It was morning in June, but in Denmark that did not spell summer, even if the calendar stubbornly tried to label it so. I quickly tucked my toes back into the warmth of my bed, no need to hurry up, and instead I looked out the first floor windows to the pure majesty of the tree standing right outside of it. It was swaying its long branches with translucently newly green leaves in the wind, shaking off the rest of the rain from last night’s storm. Around it endless fields of grass with patches of sunlight up a hill at the end of which nothing was visible but the sky. Uninterrupted sky. Even with parts of blue in it, in between all of the cloudy, overcast white.

- Imagine growing up here, I thought to myself and send a thought to the soon to be five children of the priest who’s house this was. 

I was in the annex to the century old home of pastor to the church just next to it, a typically Danish small white church with a history reaching back a thousand years to the early middle ages.

Looking out of the window at all of this wonder, I knew I was fortunate beyond words. My brain knew, the rational parts of me knew. 

And yet finally getting up and opening the door towards the tree and the fields to let the cold morning air in, all I felt was alone.

Mornings were always hard like that for me. Even waking up in bedrooms that I had occupied for years, I woke up with a sense of unfamiliarity. An uneasiness, a sinking feeling that this was not my home.

I usually began my days with a simple, but almost always effective self made mantra: ‘I am ok, I am ok, I am ok, I am ok’. I began the nights like that as well.

This morning, though, was different, and my little mantra wasn’t quite enough.

This day marked my anniversary: It was exactly one week ago that I had become officially homeless. I no longer had an address. I no longer had a place for amazon to send my tooth brushes to. No street name to put in forms. No numbers to write on labels for bags to be checked in for flying. Good thing I didn’t check in baggage. I had so little these days, I didn’t need to. On all levels of symbolism, even the down-to-earth practical one.

So this morning was different than all other mornings:

I woke up in a place that was not my home. In a bed that was not mine with borrowed covers, resting my head on a borrowed pillow. In the corner was my cyclamen backpack, in neat piles around me all I have now.

And where as my brain was telling me all the truth about how fortunate I am – not to be sleeping on a bench, being warm, being safe, surrounded by the kindest of people here, having a place to shower and even food in a fridge – the other part of me just insisted on … alone.

The day I had dropped my key into my mailbox for the very last time, I had made a pledge: 

This journey was ging to be one of brutally honest with what is going on with me. 

For myself, because honesty was the only way forward, it was the only way to know what was living inside of me, and how I could move it into the light. However shameful it might be in the eyes of the world, however much the sense normally would be to hush up and smile.

This I knew: If I didn't face whatever came up head on, working with it was obviously impossible. And if I couldn't work with it, I couldn't change it. It would hide and grow stronger, while I grew smaller. That was no way of living. And I want to live.

But even more I knew: This was never about me. Being honest about all of the darkness that lived in the corners of my existence was shining a light for all of us. Every single one out there who needed a hand to hold as they walked into that dark place, too. My hope was that maybe by seeing me doing it first, others might feel like they could do it, too. We might go in there on our own, but in reality, we were always doing it together. 

*

This day, a simple reality hit me hard: I am alone. 

And it hurt like acid poured into eyeballs.

When you live in the city, as I had done, it’s so easy to forget you’re alone: You are surrounded by other bodies at any given moment of the day. 

Even during the night, when you wake up at the sound of your downstairs neighbor coughing in his sleep. You busy yourself. There are always things to do, people to see. If you have money, it’s even easier; a new play, a new movie, a new exhibit. 

If you don’t have money – like me – there are still all the minutiae that make up a life; groceries needs shopping, clothes needs washing, there are showers to be taken. 

But when you uproot yourself, you also uproot the illusion. There are no distractions anymore. And you’re left with what was there all along: You’re alone.

You are forced to look straight into the face of reality.

Reality is not hard or good or anything. It just is.

It’s the facing of it that’s hard.

This morning, I crawled back under the covers, and felt my toes slowly warm back up. I allowed it; the knowing of this being real: Alone.

I let it live in me, travel around in my body, pausing as a feeling of ants speeding around in my legs; the urge to run away from the uncomfortable truth. Pausing as a tightness in my chest, a difficulty to breathe; fear of being in danger, with no tribe to protect me. Pausing as a clenching in my throat; sadness of not being in a tribe for protection, but even more for a sense of belonging. Before finally feeling it settling in the hollows of my heart.

I made sure I did not try and change it. No fixing allowed here. What is going to save me is not sweeping in and serving me an insta-family. Or hooking me up with Tinder. I am not looking to gloss this over. Or to pull in new distractions from what is.

Nor am I wallowing in depression or feeling sorry for myself. Or want anybody else to feel sorry for me. That is missing the point.

And please, just before someone can’t take it anymore and burst out in the ‘ooooh, but you have us, we will miss you, we can be your family!’

Please don’t.

Because that is simply not REAL. It’s very sweet. And also very misguided. Because it is NOT real. You are not my family. Please do not make it worse by saying you are. No one who is not ACTUALLY ready to adopt someone should say they are family. It opens wounds that are just not right to open, unless you are there for the long haul to mend them back together.

So please stop trying to distract me when I name this truth: I am alone. No one is dependent on me, it truly would not affect anyone if I wasn’t here. That is just fact. Don’t change it. Don’t deny it. I don’t.

I sit with the truth.

The truth is I’m a stranger – in this world, I’m a stranger.

I pass through. Even here. Among the most wonderful people on the planet, the sweetest family with four children and the fifth on the way. With a gorgeous grandmother who makes a mind-blowing Chilean fest of a meal for everybody here. like she did yesterday. It resonated with the feeling of what it must have been to live on a farm 100 years ago; that everybody mattered, all gathered together for the communal meal. But even here in this magical, wonderful place, I am alone: In just a moment, I will be somewhere else, and they will be here still, welcoming the next stray into their flock. Just like the sweet cat, Betty, in the barn.

And then – how do I even defend doing anything, right? How do I think I can travel and experience anything – when there is in the end no one who reaches out to me to hear how I am? How whatever I’m in the middle of affected me? Am I happy? Do I need anything? Someone to be accountable to, someone who cares, not just that one day, that one year – but all the days in all the years. I have no clan, no tribe, no family, no husband or wife, no children. This morning I sorely missed a dog. Just something living to speak to and love. If I disappear tomorrow, it will affect no one. Not really. That’s just reality.

There it is: Truth. The real. Not good, not bad. Just what is.

And it’s hard. Just like everybody I long for community, for closeness, for relationships. They just don’t work for me. I don’t work in them. I disappear inside, I forget who I am, I mold myself to the other in pure primal fear I will be discarded once again. And of course I always am, because in the end, I am already gone in my eagerness to fit in; I evaporate.

So. There it is. The reality of the day. Here I stand. Untethered. Free falling. No idea where I’m going or what will become of me.

But at least I’m not in the city anymore, breathing passed-on oxygen from the lie that I am not alone.

This reality is a firm rock, I can stand true here.

And you know what?

There is such grace in that. It’s a place to start. Maybe even the only place there is, the place we all have to truly be at, in order to go anywhere.

So here’s my challenge to you today, as night falls where I am and the tree outside my window is wrapped in the darkening of the light. And the still voice in me again whispers: ‘I am ok, I am ok, I am ok’ until I almost fall asleep:

What is the thing that thing that lives in you, that you dare not speak? What is the truth resting under your heart that you cannot tell? For fear of ridicule or of not being heard or being brushed of with distraction or gas lighted into thinking it’s not even worthy to think, let alone speak? Maybe today do so anyway. Maybe just to yourself, how does that sound?

The night is deep, but we can light a little candle, and go forward anyway. Let’s go there together.

It’s hard. It hurts. Let’s do it anyway.