Driving, Walking, Writing, Praying

Dec 27

Content warning: Suicidal ideation

I. Introduction

Right now, sitting in my room with Covid, would be a perfect time to receive spiritual enlightenment, but I keep playing the next episode of Dead End, so I think it will have to wait. This isn’t my first isolation in this pandemic, though it is the first time I’ve actually been sick. The word ‘isolation’ has me thinking about the word ‘solitude,’ the differences between them. One, it seems, is forced upon you, and the other you undertake by choice. In my isolation I’m kept great company. I talk to siblings and friends on the phone for hours, I message colleagues on Microsoft Teams, I read and I read and I read.

I’m never alone, not really, because I won’t allow it. I’m an introvert, so time away from others is important to me. But I’m still not alone. To be alone would be to invite myself to ask big questions. To be alone would be to face things that need facing, that I am afraid to face. To be alone, in short, would be to risk a spiritual experience. Obsessed as I am with spirituality, I’m not ready for that.

This essay comes to you in four parts, four times and four places and four opportunities for solitude that I have either taken or declined. When we are alone, and still, an encounter, whether with the depths of ourselves or something higher, is inevitable, and I think that’s why I avoid solitude at all costs.

II. Williamsburg, 2019: Driving

The fall of 2019 was probably the worst season of my life. I remember it in bits and pieces; hyperventilating outside Russian Literature class, escaping to the costume shop, driving and driving. I cut class at least twice a week, often more, and I wanted to die. Instead of acting on this, I drove. I had a light-blue Honda CRV and I would go down the Colonial Parkway until I hit Jamestown, and then sit in my car and wait.

I was waiting to feel better, or for it all to end. I wasn’t sure which was preferable, but one felt much more possible. In that waiting, I was alone. I ran away from everyone around me because I was afraid of them. I would call this an isolation, but a self-imposed one. People tried to reach out to me, and sometimes they succeeded, but I kept myself to myself that fall.

All I remember is sitting at the Sunoco, trying not to cry as I skipped my costume design class and then deciding to follow Richmond Road as far as it would take me. In all that isolation, I never prayed. It had already been nine months since I left the Church, and I was still afraid of what I might find if I opened the door behind which I kept God. I never prayed, but I begged. I begged for an end or a beginning, for a change. I went to the school psychiatrist and she prescribed me small doses of small pills, and nothing brought relief.

I was too numb to be angry, but the spiritual encounters I had in my isolation were always devastating. I would drive alone, listening to David Bowie, the closest thing I had to God, and the question always on my lips was why. Why had the world been bloodlet? Why had my life been robbed of meaning? Why did I feel like I was floating in a spacesuit, a million miles from earth?

I consider that time one of deep spiritual searching. I had a sacred reading book club where we read The Last Unicorn and treated it as holy, and that book, too, was a piece of isolation. Each of the characters, even as they build community, is on their own. And they encounter, in their solitude, something inexplicable. I encountered something inexplicable in my solitude, driving around Williamsburg, skipping classes, running away, but I was too far gone to interrogate it. I was too far gone to hide from it, either.

III. Arlington, 2020: Walking

From March to August of 2020, I lived with my parents. I was the most stable I had been in years. I was on the right medication, I slept regularly, I was eating well. Despite the onset of the Pandemic, I was as happy as I had ever been in college. But it was undeniably a time of solitude. Especially once I graduated, I had nothing to do all day but apply for endless jobs and walk. I walked for hours, exploring the neighborhood I had lived in my whole life.

But the important thing about this time is that I did not actually accept solitude. These walks could have been reflective or emotionally significant, but they weren’t, because I wouldn’t allow it. After the fall, I didn’t want to face anything bigger than myself. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to risk the desire returning. So I listened to podcasts, hours and hours of podcasts. I would set out from my parents house and turn right, walk up the grueling hill behind the elementary school, pass houses with enormous pine trees, sweat in the summer heat. And never did I allow myself quiet or space.

I asked big questions and I thought about forces beyond me; I was still in the sacred reading group, now focusing on The Silmarillion. But that was with other people. I could talk about these things without actually having to face them, because I was never on my own. My walks broke up the endless, boring days, but they did no more than that.

It was a time, right after graduation, when I could have benefitted from some introspection. I wasn’t getting a job, and I could no longer find meaning in academic pursuits. If I had taken the time to ask myself what I valued, and what that meant, I might have come to know myself more deeply. Instead, I listened to Switched on Pop or The Adventure Zone and let the hosts keep me company.

At the time, I thought I was alone for hours every day. I now see that there was no real solitude, no time for spiritual encounters. I would not face things too large for comprehension. I have grace for that. I was healing, recovering from three years of continual mania and depression. I didn’t need to ask big questions; I needed to know I could survive. But it was that summer that taught me that even in enforced isolation, we can escape solitude.

IV. Boston, 2021: Writing

When I moved to Boston a year ago, I knew one person in the whole city. I made friends with my housemates quickly, but I remained socially isolated. Instead of going out and exploring and making friends, I stayed at home and I wrote.

I worked on a few projects at the time, some essays, editing a novel, and for a few months, writing a musical. These pursuits appear to be solitary. I sat alone in my room, or alone at the library, and I put words to paper. I sat alone at the piano and I put words to music. I wrote about big questions like corporeality and sexuality and prayer. If this was not a space for spiritual encounter, what else could be?

It wasn’t. I maintain that I was never writing alone, because the audience was always with me. Solitude, chosen, is not solitary when you’re writing for publication as I was. Even my musical, which I rationally knew would never see the stage, was written for an audience. I was not facing the spiritual questions which, by that point, were pressing in around me. I was instead imagining how my words would be perceived. I was shaping them, manipulating them, to communicate exactly what I wanted to with my audience.

It doesn’t matter if a piece never has an audience; I still write for others at least as much as I write for myself. And in writing this month’s newsletter, and reflecting on the solitude of last fall, I have realized that this so-called spiritual practice of mine (writing monthly essays) is not quite the introspective exploration I had imagined it to be when I started. Every month, I write for you. I know you will see these words. And that means that I am not alone, and I am not facing anything larger than myself and my audience.

When I write something, it becomes true to me. Last fall, when I wrote an essay about my human body, several new truths emerged. That, in a way, is a spiritual practice. But I never accepted those truths for myself; they were truths I was giving away to others. You keep me company every time I write, and I have never had a spiritual experience while writing that compares to the spiritual experiences I used to have in prayer. I avoid anything that can scare me, and I am scared of questions without answers.

V. Boston, 2022: Praying

I have prayed once in the last two years. In April, I decided I wanted to go to the Triduum–Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. I missed the beauty and the passion and the aching loneliness of those holy days, and there was a Church in Back Bay with a progressive congregation. The Wednesday before, I sat alone in my room. I put away my computer. I closed my journal, then I closed my eyes. I breathed in. I dispelled the thoughts competing for attention, and for the first time since 2019, I let myself be alone.

The tears came almost immediately. I faced things I had not known I needed to face: the void at the center of my life, where my faith used to be. I found myself speaking aloud to a God I did not believe in, and I found myself asking why did you leave me. I uncovered a deep well of anger I didn’t know was there, anger at the abandonment I felt. I sat for fifteen minutes, truly alone with my soul, and I was afraid.

Without distraction, without podcasts or writing or music or friends, I could not deny the truth: I have no sense of meaning in my life and I don’t know what my purpose is. Only alone could I admit this. Only alone could I feel the gaping wound, unhealed, left in my gut when I left the Church.

The next day I sat at St. Cecelia’s waiting for Holy Thursday service to start, and sitting in the pew in front of me were two men who were clearly in love with each other. That alone was enough to make me cry, and I kept crying for the thirty minutes I stayed. In that church, surrounded by Catholics, I let myself once again be alone. I prayed again. I was struck with a revelation about the nature of divinity, a revelation I only half-remember now, and I ran out of the Church when they started washing feet. Almost hysterical, I sent a voice memo to a friend, convinced that I could regain something I had lost with my new sense of who God was.

But I lost the revelation, and I haven’t let myself be alone since then. I have kept those doors locked. I have not addressed the lack of meaning in my life, nor have I addressed the pain the Church caused me. Everywhere I walk, I wear earbuds and listen to podcasters or musicians. I don’t pray. I don’t even let myself sit in the moment of silence before dinner every night. I fill it in my head with to-do lists or conversations I want to have with housemates. Whether it’s solitude or isolation I need in order to face the questions that I still need to face, I am avoiding either one.

VI. Conclusion

Recently I have been tempted to return to the Church. I’m not sure whether that means going to Mass once, or trying to join a community of Catholics. There are so many reasons not to, and I know I won’t, but the longing is there. Once, solitude was a thing I loved. Once, it did not frighten me.

But in truth, that wasn’t solitude, either. I wasn’t facing myself, by myself; I was with God. They spoke to me, they were with me, and I didn’t have to be afraid. There was no black pit at the center of my life. I could look into the depths of me and I had company, someone by my side as I faced it all. I don’t have that anymore.

So I go through life avoiding solitude and silence. I keep myself busy, keep myself distracted. It works almost all of the time. But I don’t know if it’s sustainable. A part of me will always crave God, even when I don’t believe in them. Though I am a nihilist at heart, I wish I didn’t have to be. When I am in solitude, I know things I don’t want to know. I know that I am wild in my soul, baring my teeth, and I know that there is neither cause nor effect for this.

Driving, Walking, Writing, Praying

Responding to Joy Williams

For the Conversion of Souls