“But Elizabeth, we’re all alone.”
I was a Junior in college, just having broken up with my high school boyfriend of 3 1/2 years and found myself trapped at a intergenerational latino festival with some of my friends. Watching couples slow dancing. Adorable couples who had been married the longest of anyone at the festival. Married for 25, 30, 50 years.
That moment I finally felt the truth of my breakup. For the first time in years, I was desperately alone. I felt those jagged, abandoned pieces inside my chest that were raw and broken. On the edge of collapsing into tears or throwing up on the dance hall floor.
My friend Tracy took one look at me, pulled me out of the room & drove me back to the dorms. While giving me this demotivational, come to jesus speech as I wept in the passenger seat next to her.
“Elizabeth, you cannot trust anyone.”
“Even when you are in a relationship, the only person you can depend upon is yourself.”
“We are born alone, and we die alone.”
Her words still haunt me. Fourteen years later. Today.
Because this morning I woke up with a case of the melancholies.
It’s nothing. It’s everything.
My daughter being in camp full time, a readjustment of my role in her life and the time I have with her, and my definition of myself as a mother and a woman. The instability of my business, where half of my launches fail or underperform, I’m constantly living on the edge, two launches away from going under. The idiosyncraticness of my love life. The status or lack thereof of my bank account. The uncertainty of where I will be, in any part of my life, in 6 months from today. In 6 days from today.
Most of the time all of those things are amazing and exciting, interesting and challenging, full of deliciousness and ecstasy.
Today, I just feel blank. Unclear. Alone.
And I thought about what Tracy said.
And pictured that gapingvoid cartoon.
That cartoon that haunts me. Haunts me in such a way that as much as it resonates with me, I can’t bring myself to buy it and hang it on my wall.
“The price of being a Wolf is LoneLiness.”
I don’t want to believe that I am either a sheep buying into the bullshit of false security, or a wolf who is forced to walk the earth alone in order to stick to my integrity, to my art, to my calling.
I don’t want to believe that that the only way to live my truth, is to be alone.
I miss being part of a team. I miss having people who work with me, where I can depend on them to help with projects, brainstorm ideas, that feeling of “we” instead of everything just being me. I miss having a partner, where together we’ve chosen each other and created a sanctuary from the insanity of the outside world, where I get to be completely myself. I miss building something together, I miss creating something with someone else.
This is the part of the post where I was going to switch gears.
I was going to launch into a brilliant self-help section on how you can get out of the melancholies, based upon what worked for me today.
But nothing worked for me today.
I went for a 2-hour walk by the bay, drank the triple grande nonfat nowhip mocha, ate the everything bagel with plain cream cheese. I worked out hard and drank lots of water. I ate a big bowl of pasta with tomato cream sauce, indulged in dark chocolate, utilized my vibrator, wrote in my journal, made lists of everything that’s good in my life. I had long text conversations with a best friend, watched a movie, chatted with people on twitter and facebook.
Here’s the thing. I intellectually understand that my life is awesome.
Yes, I am part of a powerful tribe. Yes, I am blessed with amazing best friends. Yes, I am not really alone, when it comes down to it.
I intellectually understand that … but today, I don’t feel that. All I feel are the melancholies. No matter what I do.
So today I’m going to give myself permission to just feel that way. Maybe I need a day off from epicness and awesometasticness. Maybe I have real shit going on that I need to work through. I don’t know what the deal really is about.
Today, I’m taking the day off from fixing myself.
I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
I'm Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, a writer, teacher, and coach.