I’m just realizing that I’ve been more antisocial for the past few weeks. Which isn’t a bad thing. It feels deep inside like I need to preserve the peace I have and not reach out to those I love. It infuriates me, but that’s how it is in my brain.
I’ve had my son with me for a month now, only broken up by letting him go stay a night with friends or my parents. Then back to me. Which is truly what I wanted. What I need is fighting me though, and it’s painful and doesn’t make sense. Not to anyone but myself. I simply don’t have the extra energy to spend with others when I have someone needing me and in my daily life 24/7. But he comes first. He always will, as I swore when I came back to live in the same town he’s in, when I left Idaho and my Stardust. So more time with him means I’m not as actively interacting with others online, and means I’m much less likely to spend time with anyone outside my home.
The anxiety has been peeking its ugly head again…and I know what is making it come back.
Growing up I shared a bedroom with my little sister until I was eighteen. We had bunkbeds and would separate them now and again, but it never was peaceful. I never felt relaxed in there. Even hanging a curtain between our spaces, or putting a strip of tape down the floor to mark what was hers and what was mine, it didn’t matter. I never had a haven in our home. Growing up an introverted child and yet raised from birth as a Jehovah’s Witness meant I never had peace. There were meetings on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Saturday mornings we spent in the door-to-door ministry. School during the week full of people, no extracurricular activities because we had to spend every spare moment preparing for the meetings or doing homework. Very rarely would any of us get a chance to be at home without anyone else around, and no one in our family had their own space to retreat. Every room was common space, everything was shared. And every moment full of other people.
Hell is other people.
I’d find my solitude outside. My saviors were books and trees and the cats that lived with our family. They were our family. I’d have a book in hand and wander out to the creek at the bottom of the hill we lived on in town. The creek was attached to the park about half a mile away, and I’d hop from stone to stone when the water was low, stopping to peek at crawdads where it pooled, and toads in the muck lining the water. I’d find trash that washed downstream, sticks long enough to fashion into a bow, little stones to chip into pretend arrowheads. I’d tuck myself under the roots of cottonwoods and willows, read for hours, and never miss a single soul. I’d climb fences in the neighborhood looking for dark unused backyards. I’d climb onto the roof of whatever building was untended, scaling TV antennae in a world before the internet.
When I was twelve we moved away from the little neighborhood, I got riding lessons, dad got my sister and I horses. She never took to hers like I did mine…which I didn’t mind, really. Slowly as my mare and I got closer and trusted one another more we’d wander farther from home, riding for hours at a time, sometimes overnight.
Out under the stars with nothing but a can of beans, some water, a blanket…far away enough on the neighboring ranch that I couldn’t even hear the country roads anymore…I found peace and serenity, the touch of the divine, in ways I never could with other humans around. I’d wait impatiently for my next wandering, and dream of the night skies and the silence punctuated by insect song and owl calls. Being stuck in class the following Monday morning was a torture I’d wish on no one.
As I grew I became more social, I developed crushes, I left behind the peace to find something that fed other urges. I got married at nineteen, moving from sharing a room with my sister to sharing a room with someone I barely knew. My days were full of people at work, people at the Kingdom Halls, and a person at home in my bed. My anxiety elevated. I became an insomniac and started drinking to sleep. I became an alcoholic. I drowned the quiet within me and filled it with everything that I was “supposed” to want, to need, to be.
The wandering girl sat in her room inside me, just waiting for the wild to come back to her. She didn’t realize that she’d turned away from it, pushed it aside, to be the person all of the people expected. She was silenced and couldn’t understand why.
I forgot about her. I lived in a bottle. Her voice was drowned out with cheap vodka and routine and nine-to-fives and endless meetings and field service door-to-door.
I got sober to have a child. I couldn’t sleep, even though I needed it desperately. I stopped flying in my dreams at night. I divorced his dad and the cult at the same time. I began to live in a bottle again when my son was with his new stepmom. I could sleep again, finally. But my dreams had gone. The girl inside was put in my past, and forgotten.
People surrounded me every moment, and my peace was only in my glasses of vodka and annihilation at night in a bottle.
Almost three years ago I finally put it down. I haven’t returned to the bottle. Instead I’ve returned to my life. I listen to the trees again when I walk. They burn a warm heat in my palms when I pass them and touch their leaves. I have time alone, long fought for. The girl is back, blinking her eyes at the light, finally freed from the blacked-out rooms swimming in cheap alcohol.
I pass my days mostly in silence. My ears finally have some rest, but my mind is constantly speaking, singing, stretching, realizing its freedom has returned. I go hiking alone, walking alone, but it’s never quiet. Everywhere is life and my love filling the space between myself and our Mother. Soil cradles me when I stop to rest, trees sing me to sleep, ladybugs alight on my elbows and take wing again in the warm breeze. Stones echo a millennia into my fingertips when I touch them. The soles of my feet root into the deep cool silence beneath me.
They all stop when people are near. No matter how much I love them. No matter how much I need certain ones in my life my soul aches for silence more deeply. Humans shout even when they aren’t making a sound, their skin throbs rhythms that bounce off walls of rooms until it reverberates into screaming, and I can feel them on my skin without even being touched. No longer do I have the insulation of booze to shade me from their noise and needs. If I love them they’re even louder, and I fight my own inclinations to show my people how deeply they matter to me. I can’t have them thinking I don’t need them, want them. Especially not my child.
So when he stays with me full time, when my mind is full of love for him, and meals to make, memories to craft, moments that are precious, I withdraw from the world. Every bit of softness is for him, and I simply don’t have much left for anyone else. Even if my heart is exploding with adoration and I want to cry happy tears for a touch, a cuddle, a kind word, it hurts.
I suffer to have loved ones near, I suffer to know they don’t understand my energy pushing them away even when my arms are full of them and my lips full of adoration and praise. After a lifetime of only hearing the needs of others and ignoring my own I’m on a buttress of rock with waves crashing all around, and the noise is sometimes so loud I can’t hear my own voice anymore.
So those I love, and who love me, please understand I’m fighting my own inclinations to be actively in your company. To keep up with my own needs is sometimes an impossible task. I simply can’t hear me when anyone is around, especially if I love them desperately as I love my own child. And no matter how much I love my son I need my time alone to have a balanced brain. This isn’t a want. This is a need.
This is why my phone is always on silent and turned face down.
This is why I don’t respond immediately when I’m messaged or called.
It’s because I love you so deeply that I disappear from myself and forget the sound of my inner voice. And I can’t allow myself to do that every moment of every day anymore.
A Burd in Flight 