Stenocereus eruca, the creeping devil cactus, Puerto San Carlos BCS
The field work and data gathering portion of the trip was much quicker than I thought it would be also, thanks to a statistical protocol I was sent by a colleague that greatly reduces the amount of boots on the ground field data one needs to collect. I was on Isla Magdalena for three days, instead of 10. I appreciated that. 
Isla Magdalena
In general, I am burned out, finally, on Baja California. Many signs of this burnout, but in particular, my feeling of being eager to be done with it when I am there. I used to never want to leave. I just need a break, I think. It's still one of my favorite places on Earth.
The biggest set of reflections that have been on my mind all center around loneliness and not belonging, not fitting in and not being part of. I had a lot of alone time of course on my travels to think about these things. Many things occurred to me.
— I have rarely felt, at any time of my life, that I belonged where I was. This is a very common sentiment among alcoholics and addicts. I am no different in this regard. I learned how to pretend at an early age, and have often found myself in weirdly hollow and unfulfilling situations as a result of my chameleon nature. It is only my outside that changes. The inner feeling of not belonging remains.
— The enduring feeling of my life has been loneliness. I have been lonely when a boy, as I grew up, in adulthood. I have been lonely when alone, when with a partner and when with a crowd. I have been lonely in school and out of school, in work and on weekends. Loneliness is the characteristic emotion and sense of things of my entire life. I have found myself lonely within recovery programs, even while surrounded by people who completely talk and think the way I do.
— The only moments in my life when the enduring experience of loneliness has lifted have been either when I have fallen in love or when I have entered comfortable solitude. The issue with the relief of loneliness provided by falling in love is that the loneliness creeps back into my sense of things. I often end up having the nagging feeling that my partner would laugh me out of the room if she knew the real me. I have tended to under-communicate in the past. As a result I do not feel heard or seen. I have often chosen partners who are preoccupied and forgetful or who have attention deficits, obviously as a strategy to explain away my loneliness. "It's not about you, she's just forgetful and busy." When someone else takes the time to get to know me and truly pays attention, it is an unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeling, and it can even cause anxiety.
— The most enduring relief from loneliness has been solitude. But it takes me time and some discomfort or even a kind of spiritual agony to get to solitude. It's a long walk through loneliness to get there. Once I am there, however, I feel completely at ease, peaceful and unconcerned about this whole conundrum of my social relations and my place in human life. These are the stretches of time I am so hungry for when I go camping and hiking, or traveling in general. Again, traveling is a way to justify not belonging, since, of course, while traveling, by definition, you don't belong.
Anyway, it looks to me like my addictive behaviors, codependent sex and love addiction and a lot of other sources of my suffering come from trying to find some relief from this bottomless loneliness. I was extremely lonely in the partnership with A and I am sure she was too, since I disappeared.
It's especially painful to seek company as a remedy for loneliness but then not experience much understanding or connection with that company. I'd rather just get to solitude than have loneliness reinforced by oblivious presence. One of the big challenges of the current relationship situation is that it combines physical absence with attentional unavailablity. I spent months trying to manage that challenging intersection and saw clearly while on my trip that it was okay to just let go. It is what it is.
In addition to loneliness, switching states is very challenging for me. Going from connection to solitude is not a transition with which I am very resilient. I try to hang on to the connection or I try to hang on to the solitude. It is interesting to work on just being more resilient. It's connection time. It's solitude time. You can shift. It won't kill you.
Not belonging has taken a series of very strange forms over the years. A memory I had recently is one of those powerful, very painful moments, even though the setting was quite trivial. I was on my lunch break from the Barnes and Noble Sales Annex in Manhattan, where I was a warehouse clerk. I was 19. I went to an Italian deli and I used a precious few dollars to buy a meatball parmigiana sandwich. I took my little sandwich outside on 18th street somewhere near 5th Ave and I unwrappd it from the butcher paper and I started eating it. And the thought completely possessed me: "You don't know how to do any of this. You don't know how to do this life, this planet, this culture. This city, being a human. You don't know how. You'll never know how. You'll always be an outsider, outside even the other outsiders. The best you'll ever be able to do is fake it."
It was a truly surreal moment because there was no reason for it. I was just being a New Yorker, by outward appearances.
That's just one example of many, probably hundreds, where the same narrative and the same sense of never being able to get this life right, not belonging in it and never being at ease in it unfolded. Most of the people with whom I tend to spend time probably have this exact same sense of being from another planet. Of not really getting the way things work here. Of always having to figure it out and then pretend.
Sky, Thorndyke Primitive Campground, 9000 feet, Death Valley
No comments:
Post a Comment
This is an anonymous blog, mostly in an effort to respect the 12th tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous. Any identifying information in comments will result in the comment not being approved.