“For the last twenty-some years, I have tried everything in sometimes suicidally vast quantities – alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant compulsion and obsession – to avoid having to be in the same room with that sense of total aloneness.” *
Some of us, as we grow up or older, as we gather sometimes overwhelming amounts of stuff and responsibility, lose track of those moorings that keep us from spinning out of control. We can’t seem to find the time for everything or is it that we choose not to make the time for those things we think we no longer need because we now have so much more.
Reading has always been my strongest anchor. Books the center I could always orient to because there I could count on finding a connection, a lifeline that eluded me in the real world. In the words of other humans I did not know and would never know, I often found my salvation and a tiny hold on sanity. If there was even one other human out there who could put into words the maddening sense of nothingness that has always lived in the center of my soul, then I too might one day find my voice, a way to speak my lonely song.
And if I could do that, then maybe one day, I could be someone’s anchor, someone’s tiny hold on sanity and that would give some purpose to my existence, enough purpose to make it worth living.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped reading. I got too busy playing at being a grown up, working hard to make a living, being a wife, a mother, a weekend warrior.
It was OK as long as I was so busy that I really didn’t have the time to think about, let alone feel that nothingness in the middle of my soul. I was finally being useful, doing all those things I was supposed to do, my life was filled with all the blessings anyone could ask for. If only that 4-year-old trouble maker would have just kept her big mouth shut and minded her own business. There was no pleasing her with all the normal grown up gifts I tried to quiet her down with. She wanted none of it, yet she wanted so much more.
And when it all fell apart, like Anne Lamott, I found other tasks I could turn into obsessions. First there was motherhood and God knows there is plenty to obsess over when you are responsible for another being you know you cannot possibly raise without breaking to one degree or another. I guess it could have been a lot worse.
Then when my child started getting older and no longer needing me so much, a scrawny, mangy, pathetic, discarded dog walked into my life and that random act of fate would consume my life for the next decade.
I was well on my way to rampant compulsion when the retired psychologist with the snotty dog waltzed into my life. The jury is still out as to whether that was a gift from heaven or another hellish detour.
“Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God’s advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.” *
God, I love Anne Lamott and today I am happy for having found her again.
Old friends make the nothingness a little less oppressive.
* Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son’s First Year.