Witness

Rummaging through some computer files, I found this piece that I wrote in about 2001. In reading it over, I wondered if it’s still true in the age of social media and quick, all-hours connection. Also, it seems I’ve been writing about loneliness for a very long time!

WITNESS

Henry Porter, the debonair British editor of Vanity Fair, was a guest on the talk show I work on and while the lot of us were out for drinks after the taping he said something simple, yet so profound that all who heard it have found cause to repeat it at one time or another. He said that recently a single  male friend of his made a confession of sorts, saying  he envied Henry his marriage relationship because when you live alone and are unattached, you have no witness to your life, and no-one’s life to witness. And it can be quite lonely and a little frightening.

True.

I call it the “check in.”

Something else:  While reading a book called Solitaire, in which writer Marion Botsford Fraser takes the temperature of Canadian single woman — currently an unprecedented 4 million of us —  one thing became painfully, depressingly clear to me. People will say anything in order to avoid saying they are lonely. Out of 50 excerpted interviews, only about four women were able to even utter the word. These four women were over 50. If you’re young and single you may not use the L-word (those damn L-words are a big problem, aren’t they?). It seems to be socially unacceptable.

But the truth is we all get lonely. Every single living being. Even cats and dogs get lonely. We are not meant to live in isolation from one another. It is the most natural thing in the world to be among people, and to fall into couples. To touch and be touched. To have a witness and to bear witness. What is unnatural is this denial and bravado we are all striving so hard to pull off. Like we’re fooling anyone anyway! Lest we should be considered crazy women with a small apartment, dinner for one, the cat batting about the ball of yarn we are using to knit doilies, or worse, booties for someone else’s baby. Lest we be perceived as drying up from lack of sexual activity. Lest we be considered social outcast loser women who sit at home every night crying into the hot water of our bubble baths.  But, God forbid and heaven’s above, don’t, ever, ever, ever let anyone catch us being human, and being (don’t dare say it… okay, but only if you whisper) l-o-n-e-l-y.

I used to be one of these women who feared a word. Not anymore. Maybe because of this book, and all the transparent denial within it.  I do get lonely. Sometimes capital L lonely. Used to be my lonely feelings were attached to a specific person. So, if I spent a great deal of time with someone and then we were separated, I’d feel lonely for them. Like a best girlfriend who went away, or a boyfriend after a break-up. That was before my mom died. As long as she was alive, I really never felt free floating loneliness because I knew I always had someone within reach. A witness to my daily thoughts, triumphs, sadnesses, boredom. laughter, tears, what’s for dinner. Someone to check in with. Someone who thinks what is on my mind at any given time is important and interesting. Someone to whom I can give everything that is in my heart and on my mind. Knowing that they are willing, because of trust and friendship and love, to share their personal self and all their intimacies. I guess I’m past the point of pretending, for whatever reasons I used to, that this is not what I want, what I need. I am willing to be strong enough to be vulnerable enough to be human.