Young(ish), Alone, and in Quarantine
Welp, it only took a pandemic to get me out of writing retirement. I’d ask how you are, but I’m already quite aware of the answer.
One minute we’ve convinced ourselves the world is ending. The next minute we believe we’re going to transform American capitalism into some Jedi-force hybrid that allows the class divide to be blurred as we all rise up like a Phoenix from the COVID-19 ash.
Fingers crossed, the answer leans more toward the latter.
What I do know right now is that my dog is really happy. We spent a lot of time apart in the previous six months while I worked 50-60 hours a week at two restaurants, usually shifts on all seven days of the week.
Prior to Corona, I actually hadn’t had a day off for the entire month of February and the whole beginning of March (until Denver restaurants were shut down on March 16th, to be exact).
Now?
Well, let’s just say that I haven’t left the house – except to take Nugget for a walk – in over a month (like actually don’t even know if my car is still in the parking garage).
I want to make it clear that, when I said under my breath that I needed a break, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.
While I could write you a thesis paper on what I believe we could and should be doing to save our healthcare system, which would then save our people, which would then more quickly save our economy, I won’t bog you down with those details.
We know we need to stay home.
We. Just. Don’t. Want. To.
And that’s why I’m here. To write about that. Because, while my privileged choice of living in an Airstream full-time for a year pales in comparison to our current necessity of staying quarantined, I’d be lying if I said that the last few weeks didn’t feel a lot like my trailer days (minus the whole trailer part).
Confined space. Odd hours. Life without real pants. Forgetting days of the week. A reliance on my phone to feel just a semblance of community connection. Questioning who or what to even define as my community.
Because, alone.
And there’s the weight of it all. Right? Not just for me. But for you, too. Even if you are in a partnership or familial unit, that creeping fear of isolation. And for those of us who are actually alone (read: single), the stark reminder of the heaviness of that reality.
When that light bulb went off that I needed to start taking precautionary measures to protect myself from COVID-19, I did what most of us have done. I bought two-week’s worth of food from the grocery store (more than I had probably purchased in the last six months combined), I attempted to find toilet paper, and then I cried when my restaurants (a.k.a. my livelihood) were ordered to shut down.
It was a damn week, y’all.
To say I’m still processing my feelings would be an understatement. I believe it will take all of us months, if not years, to really organize our thought patterns around something so intense.
But I’ve mostly been reminded of my desire to do this crazy thing called life with someone else. Because researching alone. And grocery shopping alone. And sitting in my apartment alone. And taking those long walks with Nugget alone.
My Airstream taught me that I could be okay with it. The alone. It taught me that in order to show up as the best version of myself in this world, to then have the potential to assist in sharpening someone else to be his best self, that I needed to be okay with it.
My Airstream also taught me that I could be okay with it and still not want it.
I’m currently reminded that I can pay homage to my independence as a necessary strength for survival in tandem with my desire to soften into interdependent partnership. It’s something I’ve been writing about for over a year now.
Strong enough to stand alone; soft enough to admit I don’t want to.
And that’s what I had done when I moved out of my Airstream and into an apartment in downtown Denver. Alone. I started manifesting this life I wanted where I’d live in LoDo and work as an account manager for a tech company and eventually be with someone who could do, with me, all the rad shit and amazing sex.
If you read my last blog, you’ll know that the reality had looked a little different than I’d imagined. But that’s okay. It was more than okay. I was tired, don’t get me wrong, but I was also really happy. I was surrounded by people in the restaurant industry who loved me and who I loved. Dearly. I was working my way through some amazing interviews. And, the guy situation, well, we won’t go there (not today, at least).
Then, COVID-19 decided to rear its ugly head, and here we are.
And here I am being extremely observant to how we hold space here. For ourselves. For others.
What’s coming up for me as I analyze our collective language and energy is that the American Dream has bred within us two fears: being alone and being unproductive.
Most major cities and states have imposed “shelter in place” orders with the option of, at least, going outside in our loosely defined backyards. We unapologetically abused that privilege across the nation (and still are).
I repeat. We knew we needed to stay home. We just didn’t want to.
Our actions illustrated that our respective desires to fulfill our days with whatever arbitrary checklist items we’d deemed essential (i.e. hiking) superseded our need to support our communities by staying home.
Because God forbid we have to sit with ourselves. God forbid we have to go to bed without accomplishing something. God forbid we have to forfeit a few weeks of our lives.
God. For. Bid.
And damn, can I resonate. I didn’t like hanging out with myself for an extended period of time for quite a while, too. I also didn’t like sitting still, period (you can read more about my eating disorder issues and battle with body dysmorphia here).
We were being asked to stay in our nice apartments and houses – something we do like clockwork in the last few weeks of December – in order to protect both the most vulnerable people and the most vulnerable pockets of our economy, and we failed. For a myriad of reasons, we failed.
Whether or not we’re still failing or now succeeding is up for debate, and I don’t have the energy to get into those feelings right now (or maybe ever).
*continues watching sailing videos on YouTube and studying how to open a smoothie shop on the eastern coast of Africa*
Where I can go right now is into the alone and into the unnerving expectations that we place on ourselves.
Pre-Corona, our lives were filled with an exponential amount of noise.
Boyfriend dumped you, get on Bumble. Girl ghosted you, stalk her on social media. Co-worker stole your idea, go grab some drinks with your girlfriends. Client declined your up-sell, find another client.
We can still do all of these things. We are all still doing all of these things. The difference is the decibel level. We cannot lose ourselves in the coffee runs and the traffic and the fitness classes and the dinner dates. We no longer get to own “busy” as if It were some unique predicate adjective to glorify our lives.
Newsflash. We were all fucking busy.
And now, now we can’t do a lot of things. In fact, we can no longer do most things. Concerts. Sporting events. Networking shenanigans. Baby showers. Birthday parties. Bachelorette weekends. Guys’ nights out.
Noise.
And the noise silences the shit. It paralyzes the work. It masquerades as “fine.”
Newsflash. We were all fucking fine.
And now, now we are not fine.
I already hear some of you screaming at me: “I am fine, Stephanie!”
Neat. I’m fine, too. Relatively speaking, I’m fine.
PS. That’s my privilege talking.
Because I’m fine by standard of the fact that I have a really nice roof over my head and food in my fridge and access to high-speed internet.
But I am actually not fine.
I’m anxious about making rent next month. I question 72 times per day if I am both under- and over-reacting. I don’t have health insurance. I have no idea when my stimulus check will arrive and to what address (being an independent contractor is super neat right now).
Not to mention the fact that I’d love to touch someone. Platonically. But also sexually. Like, very sexually.
Sidebar. How can we be so okay without sex until we’re told that we can’t have sex? And when I say “okay without sex,” I mean months of no sex. Completely unphased.
Now?
G sus.
We weren’t dating pre-Corona, but now we mysteriously give even less fucks about swapping body fluids? And I don’t even mean sexual body fluids. I mean air droplets from speaking closer than six feet apart.
Like, guys are actually asking girls on dates right now. It’s a thing. Two people who have never met and have no idea where the other has been are actually doing things sans bars and restaurants. In their homes. During a global pandemic.
Mind. Blown.
Attention fuckboys, you’ve been furloughed. Suck it up and contact Trump if you’d like government assistance moving forward.
In the defense of men (you know I’m not biased, and you can read The Man Blog for proof), one of my guy friends said that the last three girls he’s matched with on Bumble have led with, “Hey, daddy.” Then, insert nude.
I’m sorry, WUT?!
We’ve gone mad. It’s the only explanation.
Me?
Well, as stated, I can’t go into my guy situation right now. I mean, I could, but it would be some bubbly rant where I try to explain how I get excited for my iPhone notifications (read: my nudes have one home and one home only).
In a return to the other less-joke-worthy bullshit, I want to know when I’ll get my life back. It won’t look the same. With that, I am okay. But I want to know when I’ll be able to start reconstructing my new normal (whatever “normal” even means anymore). The key word here is simply that I’m ready to reconstruct. And not having a solid timeline is killing me (hello, welcome to the life of an Enneagram Eight).
One of my old friends from Texas DMed me the other night. We spent a few minutes trying to explicate our current feelings. The word “humility” got volleyed back and forth. A lot.
What the Airstream taught me about life-altering experiences is that they will leave me more educated, both about the world and about myself.
As a single person on house arrest, sitting in silence, it is impossible to not listen to what boils up on the inside. It’s impossible to not confront myself when I don’t have another human with whom to create conflict (read: we like conflict because conflict is noise).
So, I may not know what I’ll know, but I know that I will know. Something. Anything more than what I know now.
And the anxiety stems from the fact that I also know that I will then have to make choices to align with my own integrity, choices that were so invisible to me just a few months ago, choices that should catalyze change because of the knowing.
Izzy: “So what? You’re Stephanie. You change things.”
Me: “I change myself. The impact that self has on others and things is out of my control. They change because I change, but not because I ask them to change.”
And, I repeat, I will have to change.
The noise had allowed me to forget that for a while. And alone in quarantine, there is no noise (except for the howls that explode across downtown Denver like clockwork every night at 8:00pm).
In true friend fashion, Izzy offered words of encouragement about my poise and strength and commitment to self-reflection. But it was never about those things.
Because the world wants us to choose. Being okay or not okay.
I’m here to tell you I’m both.
I’m here to tell you that you can be both, too.
Shani Silver recently wrote an insightful article called “Coronavirus & Single Scaries: I Just Want a Husband Right Now” and, if you know her writing, then you know that it is equal parts belly laughs and honest tears. The word “husband” here is merely a metaphor.
We all want someone.
To share the chores. And to hold the weight. And to read half the news to TL;DR to each other over breakfast that you both share while you congratulate each other for putting on your nice pajamas to sit in your unstated assigned seats on the couch. Before you put on your other pajamas to go back to the bedroom and fall asleep next to each other. After sex.
You coupled people better be having SO much sex right now.
And if you don’t have that someone, it’s okay.
And it’s okay that it’s simultaneously not okay.
So maybe she is on Bumble. Maybe he’ll FaceTime you without warning and you’ll spend four hours flirting – equipped with a messy bun and no bra – until your cheeks hurt from smiling. Maybe he’ll send you his favorite country songs and maybe she’ll win you over when she begs for your first date to be at a baseball game (okay, might be your 34th date at this rate).
Or maybe you’ll have the nerve to reach out to the one you simply can’t shake. I’m not talking about the toxic ex who randomly slides in uninvited and unannounced. I’m talking about the one who floods your dreams with eyes wide open. The guy who let you wrap yourself around him every night when you went to sleep. The girl who nursed you back to health when you got food poisoning that night you took her out to a nice dinner. The one who makes your heart smile, your bones rest, your soul explode with selflessness. That one.
And maybe it won’t work out.
But maybe it will.
And maybe we’ll all be a little bit better for accepting our own humility.
And maybe we’ll all be a little bit stronger and softer.
And maybe we’ll all be a little bit more obsessed with our own transparency.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll all be a little bit more empowered by our vulnerability – an open invitation to love others, a direct reflection of our ability to love ourselves.
