what will we be to each other / if the world doesn’t end? [1]
~~~
I write to be heard. I write to understand. I write to be understood. I write to share myself with you. I write so that maybe I won’t feel so alone. I write so that maybe we’ll connect.
At some point earlier in the pandemic I was catching up with a friend, and when I expressed how difficult it was, they seemed surprised. They responded something along the lines of, “Isn’t this what you were always hoping for?” Not in terms of the pandemic itself, but in not having to be social, to be able to be at home. I was saddened and disappointed by this, both because it felt incredibly dismissive, but also, that I had somehow represented myself in a way that fueled this impression.
I am not terribly social—I have social anxiety and it takes a toll—but I love being around people and I love connecting. I also hold people to high standards and, often unfairly, am easily disappointed. I am also working to understand my attachment style (likely anxious attachment), and I am careful about putting myself in a position to be left behind, to be rejected. Being misunderstood by people I care about feels like a betrayal.
I don’t really talk with that person now, and I cannot exactly place my finger on why, or when we stopped. The pandemic has been so difficult from so many angles. This is only one of its impacts.
Writing has saved my life. Writing has forged connections. Writing has saved relationships. Silence fuels my loneliness, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideations. Sometimes the words are hard to find, or slow to come. Sometimes they feel wrong, or thin, or few and far between. Once I am able to find them, well, brevity is not one of my strong suits. But I want to be understood. I want you to understand. I want you to understand me.
~~~
At 12, I wrote a note to my mom telling her I had been having thoughts of suicide. She made sure I got help.
At 13, I had a crush on SC and made a stupid joke that came from a place of insecurity and jealousy. I wrote her a letter to apologize. She was moved, and it brought us closer.
At 14, I wrote my first love letter to AH. I included a lyric from a Guns N’ Roses song. Ridiculous.
At 17, I started writing poetry to come to terms with my friend Dave’s death by suicide.
At 18, writing poetry helped me cultivate an understanding of my new life in New York City, my role as an artist trying to process 9/11, and myself in the world.
At 30, as I started to process what I knew would be my last days in NYC, I began writing letters to friends and former partners. These letters became a sort of an ongoing series, a writing project I call, Hey, I miss you; Hey, I’m sorry; Hey, thank you. I shared words long unsaid with people who had meant so much to me so that I could leave knowing that our relationships would continue strong in my absence.
At 32, I wrote a version of this letter to the woman who had been my partner for 6 years, who I thought would be the mother of my children, the person holding my hand at my parents’ funerals, who would see me through times both beautiful and terrible. Instead, she broke both my heart and her own on a sunny November day in Brooklyn a few years earlier.
I wrote to process my grief over the breakup as well as the grief of having recently left NYC, the place I had grown up in for the first 12 years of my adult life. I was grieving the death of the life I had come to hope for and believe in.
I wrote to her because I was tired of trying to hate her in order to get over loving her. I wrote to her because we shared love and life for many years, and I was grateful for the person she helped me become. I was grateful for our memories and I was working to hold only love for her in my heart. She did not reply. But while I wrote to her and for her, I also wrote for me.
At 33, I started writing for this website.
At 36, after dozens of entries in my ongoing series, I added a new section for the first time when I wrote a letter to my newly recent former-partner; Hey, I miss you; Hey, I’m sorry; Hey, you hurt me; Hey, thank you.
I am 38 today, and I am writing for my life. I am writing because I struggle with anxiety, with disordered eating, with suicidal ideations. I am writing because I am coming to terms with the realization that I struggle with depression. I am working and writing to understand the ways that I have framed my relationship with my body over the past 18 years as a struggle with chronic pain.
I am writing to understand, and to be understood.
~~~
say I miss you like a mantra / until I forget what it means / it doesn’t matter what you tell me / I just need to hear you speak [2]
I spent a good chunk of December 2020 going through what I call a slow burn anxiety attack. Or maybe a simmering panic attack, with spurts of manic feelings and prolonged bouts of uncontrollable crying. I talked to a friend who was experiencing a similarly difficult time, emotionally and psychologically, and when I asked her what was on her mind, she replied, “I just can’t wrap my head around rallying for 50 more years of this.” This. Her struggles, her unhappiness, the unrelenting-ness of everything. That phrase has echoed in my head since she said it. It continues to haunt me. But I don’t think about the next 50 years. I think about the next six months. The idea of having to rally for six more months of this was—is—just, so incredibly exhausting, and often unappealing.
I am not alone in this, I know, but I can only speak from my own experience. This year has been among the hardest I have ever known. The unhappiest I have ever been. The loneliest.
I am someone who usually doesn’t mind my own company. Though I’m not particularly social, maybe this is the New Yorker in me, I love to be alone surrounded by other people. I go to coffee shops alone. I don’t mind eating meals at restaurants alone, or sitting at a bar to have a drink alone. I’ll see movies alone. But this quarantine year has been excessive, and incredibly difficult.
This year I have fallen out of touch with people. I have lost friends to isolation and silence.
I struggle with anxious attachment, which in part makes me internalize and personalize blame. I fixate trying to figure out what I did wrong to push people away, to incur their silence. To make myself less lovable in their eyes. It’s not rational, and it’s not always rooted in reality. But it’s how my brain works. I don’t know if I have lost relationships this year as one of the many casualties of 2020, or whether I did something wrong. I could ask, but honestly, I do not know if I could handle the answer. Maybe this is me avoiding responsibility or accountability.
Maybe it’s self-preservation. Probably it’s all of it.
This year has been exhausting and it is unrelenting. I drown myself in work because if my rage is directed productively, I can distract myself from my overwhelming unhappiness. I can convince myself that continuing to live serves some sort of purpose. But I am tired.
I am tired of feeling like a hypocrite who is trying to deny the irony of undertaking a research project centered on and in ideas of community while I am so horribly and overwhelmingly alone.
~~~
you can either watch me drown / or try to save me while I drag you down [3]
A few months ago I was experiencing some unusual-for-me health symptoms that I could not necessarily connect to allergies or food. I Googled them, and apparently every possible health condition is or could be a symptom of COVID. Luckily, I have health insurance, and ASU offers free saliva-based COVID tests basically on demand. So I scheduled a test. I did not tell anyone because I did not want them to worry. But I was worried. I was able to get the test early the next day, but because it was a Sunday, I had to wait until Tuesday to get the results back. While I waited, I thought about what I would tell my mom if the test came back positive.
All I kept thinking: Please, do not let me die alone in Arizona.
I was scared, but I did not tell anyone that I was scared. I did not tell my mom or my friends. The test came back negative. No harm done.
Although.
That thought has lingered—has haunted me—please, do not let me die alone in Arizona.
I live alone, and we’re in a pandemic. Who would risk their well-being to take care of me if I got sick? If I had an accident in my apartment, how long would it take someone to notice? How much longer to find me? If I fell to the darker inclinations of my depression, who would find me? Who would call the police to break down my door?
But the test came back negative.
I am so tired of mediating myself because I am afraid of being even more unlovable.
I am so tired of curating myself on social media so that you will think what I say has value.
Over the winter, I sunk to levels of depression and anxiety I did not know were even possible. I kept repeating to myself, I don’t know how to not be myself. My suicidal ideations, usually passive and fleeting, moved for a while from the back burner to the front. Still passive, but more prominent—the hum somewhat louder.
Like many others of my generation, I rewatch familiar TV shows on Netflix. Over the past ten years, The Office was as likely to be my working background noise as music. I’ve seen my favorite films from a handful up to dozens of times. But over the winter, I found myself watching the same movie every night for weeks [4]. And I watched another movie every morning for weeks as I made breakfast and started my day. I saw a social media post recently about how this is not uncommon for people with anxiety. Rewatching the same TV show repeatedly provides a predictable emotional experience. With each of these movies, I knew when I would laugh, and I knew what would make me cry. I was allowed to feel these feelings in understandable and predictable ways, and then move on.
The endings were happy, the stories contained. Unlike all of this.
I am not confident saying, or believing, that the end of the pandemic is in sight. There are too many X factors that depend on too many people. I am not ready to let so many people I do not know disappoint me. I save that for my loved ones.
I am fortunate to have been vaccinated, but largely my life and my routine have not changed. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that maybe my friend was right. I was not happy here even before the pandemic started. I was lonely, isolated, and I drowned myself in schoolwork to believe I had a purpose.
I am scared of not having a pandemic to blame for my unhappiness.
Of having nothing to blame but myself.
Who are we coming out of this pandemic? There is no normal to go back to. We have only known violence. Racism and white supremacy. Sexism and misogyny. Ableism. Thinly constructed relationships, and superficial communities. We can be different, but not without work.
I debated writing this. I debated posting this. I cannot decide if there is a point. Is it just long-form screaming into the void? But maybe you’ll connect with something. Maybe you won’t feel so alone in your experiences.
Maybe you’ll feel seen. Maybe I will.
I guess the point is connection. As always.
~~~
Written by Brett S. Goldberg / Edited by Carrie Morrisroe & Hannah Bohart
~~~
[1] “Immune” by Jensen McRae
[2] “Repeat” by Julien Baker
[3] “Ringside” by Julien Baker
[4] Because Carrie asked, and I debated including it, because honestly, I’m embarrassed, I’ll throw it in a footnote. The nighttime movie was Happiest Season and the breakfast movie was Eurovision (which I am less embarrassed about).
