Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Fermata (1994)

  So I continued to wear contacts even when each blink was a dry torment. But then I noticed that my typing was suffering, too—and there, since I am a temp and typing is my livelihood, I really had to draw the line. Especially when I typed numbers, my error rate was way up. (Once I spent two weeks doing nothing but typing six-digit numbers.) People began bringing back financial charts that I had done with mistyped numbers circled in red, asking, “Are you all right today, Arno?” Contact lenses also, I noticed, made me feel, as loud continuous factory noise also will, ten feet farther away from anyone else around me. They were isolating me, heightening rather than helping rid me of my—well, I suppose it is proper to call it my loneliness. I missed the sharp corners of my glasses, which had helped me dig my way out into sociability; they had been part of what I felt was my characteristic expression. When I started today, I had no intention of getting into all this about eyeglasses. But it is germane. I love looking at women. I love being able to see them clearly. I particularly like being in the position I am in this very second, which is not looking at Joyce, but rather thinking about the amazing fact that I can look up from this page at any time and stare at any part of her that calls out to me for as long as I want without troubling or embarrassing her. Joyce doesn’t wear glasses, but my ex-girlfriend Rhody did—and somewhere along the line I realized that if I liked glasses on women, which I do very much, maybe women would tolerate glasses on me. On naked women glasses work for me the way spike heels or a snake tattoo or an ankle bracelet or a fake beauty spot work for some men—they make the nudity pop out at me; they make the woman seem more naked than she would have seemed if she were completely naked. Also, I want to be very sure that she can see every inch of my richard with utter clarity, and if she is wearing glasses I know that she can if she wants to. The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman, an office manager, who, I think anyway, had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  And I wrote a little girl dream. I wanted to go to the Olympics, like my teammates. When I was 11 I wrote a poem in my red notebook that went: In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim. My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water. The Best Friend WHEN I WAS 15 MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT WE WERE moving from Washington state to Gainesville, Florida because the best swim coach in the nation was there - Randy Reese, the coach of Florida Aquatic Swim Team. I remember sitting in my room alone thinking what? Why would we leave our home out of the blue for something called F.A.S.T.? Why would we leave the trees and the mountains and the rain and the green of the Northwest for a strip of sand and alligators? We didn’t know anyone in Florida. I’d never been there. The only things that mattered to me were at the pool - the only people I trusted or loved, the only time in my life I felt O.K., the only place I felt like something besides daughter. And why was he telling me we were moving for me? I didn’t ask for that. Why would I? I loved my swim coach. He was the only man I knew who was kind to me. He’s the man that explained to me why there was blood running down my leg at swim practice and what to do about it when I thought I was dying of cancer. He’s the man that I spent six hours a day six days a week with training to win. He corrected my stroke. He pushed me when I tired. He lifted me up in his arms when I won and put an arm around me and a towel when I lost. When I said, “ What about Ron Koch?” My father, he said, “ No one knows Ron Koch.” When I asked my mother her face creased with worry. She pat one hand with the other on her thigh and said “ Well, Belle, your daddy’s been promoted. It’s a lot of money.” When I asked her if she wanted to move to Florida, she said, “ He says you deserve the best. Besides Belle, it’s sunny!” In reality, my father got promoted to lead architect for the southeastern coast. But that isn’t what he told me. It was, as he put it, the sacrifice they were making for me.

• From Wild (2012)

  I took a drag and blew the smoke from my mouth, remembering how I’d felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world that morning after Jimmy Carter drove away. Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.O 12 THIS FARI woke at first light, moving with precision as I broke camp. I could pack up in five minutes now. Every item that had been in that unfathomable heap on the bed in the motel in Mojave that hadn’t already been ditched or burned had its place in or on my pack and I knew exactly where that place was. My hands moved to it on instinct, seeming almost to bypass my brain. Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one. Bearing Monster’s weight had changed me on the outside too. My legs had become as hard as boulders, their muscles seemingly capable of anything, rippling beneath my thinning flesh in ways they never had. The patches on my hips and shoulders and tailbone that had repeatedly bled and scabbed over in the places where Monster’s straps rubbed my body had finally surrendered, becoming rough and pocked, my flesh morphing into what I can only describe as a cross between tree bark and a dead chicken after it’s been dipped in boiling water and plucked. My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked. My two big toes had never recovered from the beating they took on the merciless descent from Three Lakes to Belden Town. Their nails looked near dead. My pinky toes had been rubbed so raw I wondered if they’d eventually just wear clean away from my feet. What seemed like permanent blisters covered the backs of my heels all the way up to my ankles. But I refused to think of my feet that morning in Old Station. So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing miles across Hat Creek Rim.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The glances he snatched at her enabled him to study her, and to study me in her. Her loveliness must have disarmed and disturbed him as it had me. It was a beauty which filled one with the terrible premonition that it had been born to be a target for the forces of destruction. Perhaps he remembered an anecdote of Pursewarden’s in which she figured, for the latter had found her as Nessim himself had done, in the same stale cabaret; only on this particular evening she had been sitting in a row of dance-hostesses selling dance-tickets. Pursewarden, who was gravely drunk, took her to the floor and, after a moment’s silence, addressed her in his sad yet masterful way: ‘Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude?’ he asked her. Melissa turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: ‘Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même.’ Pursewarden was sufficiently struck to remember and repeat this passage later to his friends, adding: ‘I suddenly thought to myself that here was a woman one might very well love.’ Yet he did not, as far as I know, take the risk of revisiting her, for the book was going well, and he recognized in the kindling of this sympathy a trick being played on him by the least intent part of his nature. He was writing about love at the time and did not wish to disturb the ideas he had formed on the subject. (‘I cannot fall in love’ he made a character exclaim ‘for I belong to that ancient secret society — the Jokers!’; and elsewhere speaking about his marriage he wrote: ‘I found that as well as displeasing another I also displeased myself; now, alone, I have only myself to displease. Joy!’) Justine was still standing over me, watching my face as I composed these scorching scenes in my mind. ‘You will make some excuse’ she repeated hoarsely. ‘You will not go.’ It seemed to me impossible to find a way out of this predicament. ‘How can I refuse?’ I said. ‘How can you?’ They had driven across that warm, tideless desert night, Nessim and Melissa, consumed by a sudden sympathy for each other, yet speechless. On the last scarp before Bourg El Arab he switched off the engine and let the car roll off the road. ‘Come’ he said. ‘I want to show you Justine’s Summer Palace.’

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  I run out of things to say after, ‘Hi, I’m Maddy.’” Nora, by contrast, knows lots of people. Nora is a stay-at-home mom with two kids and knows all the other moms by name from school, scouts, or soccer. She waves and says hi, exchanges small talk, and though the other moms are friendly, Nora notices they’re a bit formal with her, unsure of how to respond. “No one knows me,” Nora says. “I’m always the person who is the last to meet everyone. People always say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize you didn’t know each other.’ I know a lot of people on a shallow, acquaintance level, and I have a couple of close friends, but I’d like to branch out. I have lots of friends on Facebook, but I know that’s not real. The only person I’d really be okay confiding in is my husband. I’m always the outsider, and I’m not sure exactly how that happens. I see people talking easily about random stuff, and it’s such a mystery. I’m not sure how to get to that point.” Even without social anxiety, making friends as an adult is hard. A meta-analysis of 177,000 participants in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin found that social circles expand until early adulthood and then shrink from there. Back in 2006, a large-scale survey found that more than half (53 percent) of Americans didn’t have any confidants who weren’t family. A quarter of American adults—one in four—had no confidants at all. Over ten years later, I’d be willing to bet the percentage has crept even higher. Mix social anxiety with other challenges, like Maddy’s moving to a new city, the dispersion of graduation, getting clean or sober, going through an upheaval like divorce, or simply realizing you’ve had your nose to the grindstone so long that everyone has drifted away, and it can feel like you have to start from scratch but have no idea how this game works. And you’d think that with so many people feeling isolated, like Maddy and Nora, everyone would be talking about it. But no one does. There’s a stigma to admitting you have no friends. Or that you’re lonely. To make matters worse, if you look for advice on how to make friends, like Maddy, you usually end up with a list of places to meet people. But that’s not what you’re looking for. “Meeting people” is really different from “making friends.” One is an event; the other is a process. When Maddy searches for “how to make friends,” the answer she’s looking for is not “volunteer at an animal shelter.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I remembered all the times that I had lain here and pictured similar things, before Kitty and I had ever even kissed. I remembered when I had first slept beside her at Ginevra Road, when I was used only to sharing with my sister. Now Alice’s body felt strange to me; it seemed queer and wrong, somehow, to lie so close to someone and not kiss and stroke them ...I thought suddenly, Suppose I fall asleep, forget that she isn’t Kitty, and put a hand upon her, or a leg -?I got up, put my coat over my shoulders, and smoked another cigarette. Alice did not stir.I squinted at my watch: half-past eleven. I wondered, again, what Kitty was doing; and sent a mental message through the night, to Stamford Hill, to make her pause - whatever her business was just then - and remember to think of me, in Whitstable. [image "010" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_010_r1.jpg] My visit, after that poor start, was not brilliant. I had arrived on a Sunday, and the following days, of course, were working ones. I didn’t fall asleep, that first night, until very late, but the next morning I woke when Alice woke, at half-past six, and forced myself to rise and eat my breakfast with the others, at the parlour-table. Then, however, I didn’t know whether to offer to take up my old duties in the kitchen, with the oyster-knife - I couldn’t tell whether they would like it or expect it, or even whether I could bear to try it. In the end I drifted down with them and found I wasn’t needed anyway; for they had a girl, now, to sever and beard the natives, and she was just as quick, it seemed, as I had been. I stood beside her - she was rather pretty - and made some half-hearted passes with my knife at a dozen or so shells ... But the water chilled and stung me, and soon I preferred to sit and watch - then I closed my eyes and placed my head upon my arms, and listened to the hum of gossip from the restaurant, and the bubble of the pans ...In short, I fell asleep; and only woke when Father, hurrying by me, stumbled over my skirts and spilled a pot of liquor. Then it was suggested that I go upstairs - out of their way, they meant.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Our needs may be ancient and universal, but they can be tough to fulfill in our modern social context. For instance, the headlines warn that we’re in a loneliness epidemic—more than half of Americans consider themselves lonely. Participation is falling in the institutions of yesteryear that reflected a tighter social fabric—community organizations, neighborhoods, religious life. Social media crushes the souls of those who dare to compare their ordinary lives to otherworldly influencers armed with filters and soft box lighting. And then came the pandemic, which isolated us from one another to the point of seismically quieting the planet. It’s no wonder that when it comes to finding connection, it feels like we’re swimming upstream. Interestingly, perfectionism can buy us an ersatz copy of connection. It lights a fire under us to act, think, feel, and behave as superbly as we can and therefore gets us approval, accomplishment, and admiration (or at least seems like it’s keeping us buffered from rejection and criticism). This feels pretty darn close to safety, acceptance, and connection. But over time, approval, accomplishment, and admiration feel like the emotional equivalent of fast food—highly appealing but lacking in true nourishment and satisfaction. Even worse, perfectionism does us dirty. We feel disconnected precisely because we’re working so hard to gain acceptance. But we’re barking up the wrong tree. We want to feel like we belong, but perfectionism steers us toward #goals. We want to be accepted, but perfectionism tells us we have to earn our way into the tribe by being good at things. Part of feeling safe means avoiding the criticism of others, but perfectionism instead subjects us to a steady stream of criticism by our own hand. Overall, perfectionism is a siren song that tells us we’ll find social connection if we prioritize agency over communion, if we put goals before people. At first glance, perfectionism seems like an individual problem, but really, it’s a social problem. * * * All my clients who struggle under the weight of perfectionism are beautiful humans who work hard, care deeply, and do right by others. But they can’t see how capable and delightful they are. Perfectionism—the measuring stick they use for themselves—pokes holes in their sense of self like a porcupine’s raincoat. Accordingly, this book aims to lay bare the false promises of perfectionism and offer what we can do instead. It picks up where How to Be Yourself left off, because the heart of social anxiety is perfectionism. Drill down on social anxiety, and you’ll find it’s based on the same flawed perception—the felt inadequacy of never being good enough that separates us from others.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  We sat and began to talk about the past, rather stiffly to be sure. He had already dined on board and there was nothing I could offer him beyond a glass of the good island wine which he sipped slowly. Later he asked to see Melissa’s child, and I led him back through the clustering oleanders to a place from which we could both look into the great firelit room where she lay looking beautiful and grave, asleep there with her thumb in her mouth. Balthazar’s dark cruel eye softened as he watched her, lightly breathing. ‘One day’ he said in a low voice ‘Nessim will want to see her. Quite soon, mark. He has begun to talk about her, be curious. With old age coming on, he will feel he needs her support, mark my words.’ And he quoted in Greek: ‘First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.’ I said nothing. It was the room itself which was breathing now — not our bodies. ‘You have been lonely here’ said Balthazar. ‘But splendidly, desirably lonely.’ ‘Yes, I envy you. But truthfully.’ And then his eye caught the unfinished portrait of Justine which Clea in another life had given me. ‘That portrait’ he said ‘which was interrupted by a kiss. How good to see that again — how good!’ He smiled. ‘It is like hearing a loved and familiar statement in music which leads one towards an emotion always recapturable, never-failing.’ I did not say anything. I did not dare. He turned to me. ‘And Clea?’ he said at last, in the voice of someone interrogating an echo. I said: ‘I have heard nothing from her for ages. Time doesn’t count here. I expect she has married, has gone away to another country, has children, a reputation as a painter … everything one would wish her.’ He looked at me curiously and shook his head. ‘No’ he said; but that was all. It was long after midnight when the seamen called him from the dark olive groves. I walked to the beach with him, sad to see him leave so soon. A rowboat waited at the water’s edge with a sailor standing to his oars in it. He said something in Arabic.

• From Wild (2012)

  Doug, Tom, and Greg were wading in the shallow spot where I’d cleaned up a few hours before. Beyond them, the water raged in torrents, rushing over boulders as big as my tent. I thought of the snow I’d soon be encountering if I continued on with the ice ax I didn’t yet know how to use and the white ski pole with its cute little pink wrist strap that had come to me only by chance. I hadn’t yet begun to think about what was next on the trail. I’d only listened and nodded when Ed told me that most of the PCT hikers who’d come through Kennedy Meadows in the three weeks he’d been camped here had opted to get off the trail at this point because of the record snowpack that made the trail essentially unpassable for most of the next four or five hundred miles. They caught rides and buses to rejoin the PCT farther north, at lower elevations, he told me. Some intended to loop back later in the summer to hike the section they’d missed; others to skip it. He said that a few had ended their hikes altogether, just as Greg had told me earlier, deciding to hike the PCT another, less record-breaking year. And fewer still had forged ahead, determined to make it through the snow. Grateful for my cheap camp sandals, I picked my way over the rocks that lined the riverbed toward the men, the water so cold my bones hurt. “I got something for you,” said Doug when I reached him. He held his hand out to me. In it was a shiny feather, about a foot long, so black it shone blue in the sun. “For what?” I asked, taking it from him. “For luck,” he said, and touched my arm. When he took his hand away, the place where it had been felt like a burn—I could feel how little I’d been touched in the past fourteen days, how alone I’d been. “So I was thinking about the snow,” I said, holding the feather, my voice raised over the rush of the river. “The people who bypassed? They were all here a week or two before us. A lot more snow has melted by now, so maybe it’ll be okay.” I looked at Greg and then at the black feather, stroking it. “The snow depth at Bighorn Plateau on June first was more than double what it was the same day last year,” he said, tossing a stone. “A week isn’t going to make much of a difference in that regard.”

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  No. Individual vulnerability factors matter much more than personality type when it comes to joining or staying in a cult or abusive relationship. "Everyone is influenced and persuaded daily in various ways," writes the late Margaret Singer, "but the vulnerability to influence varies. The ability to fend off persuaders is reduced when one is rushed, stressed, uncertain, lonely, indifferent, uninformed, distracted, or fatigued.... Also affecting vulnerability are the status and power of the persuader.... No one type of person is prone to become involved with cults. About two-thirds of those studied have been normal young persons induced to join groups in periods of personal crisis, [such as] broken romance or failures to get the job or college of their choice. Vulnerable, the young person affiliates with a cult offering promises of unconditional love, new mental powers, and social utopia. Since modern cults are persistent and often deceptive in their recruiting, many prospective group members have no accurate knowledge of the cult and almost no understanding of what eventually will be expected of them as long-term members."1 Many cults have flourished in recent decades, and changes in recruitment styles and targets have occurred. In the 1970s and early '8os, primarily young adults, either in college or some other life transition, joined these groups. At that time, cults were extremely active (and some still are) on college campuses and in places where young people congregate. Today, however, increasing numbers of people in their late twenties and older are joining cult groups or getting involved in abusive relationships. In fact, the majority of inquiries to cult information resources involve new recruits or adherents who are in their thirties to fifties, or even sixties. Still no single personality profile characterizes cult members.' Most experts agree, though, that whether the joiner is young or old, certain predisposing factors may facilitate attraction to a cultic system, the success of recruitment and indoctrination efforts, and the length and depth of involvement. These factors include: • A desire to belong • Unassertiveness (the inability to say no or express criticism or doubt) • Gullibility (impaired capacity to question critically what one is told, observes, thinks, and so forth) • Low tolerance for ambiguity (need for absolute answers, impatience to obtain answers) • Cultural disillusionment (alienation, dissatisfaction with the status quo) • Idealism • Susceptibility to trance-like states (in some cases, perhaps, due to prior hallucinogenic drug experiences) • A lack of self-confidence • A desire for spiritual meaning • Ignorance of how groups can manipulate individuals3 A wide range of human susceptibility emerges when we combine the list of predisposing factors with the potential vulnerabilities mentioned above. The stereotype of a recruit is a young person worried about leaving college or uncertain about "facing life." The reality, however; is that anyone, at any age-in a moment of confusion, personal crisis, or simply a life transition-may become attracted to or drawn in by a cult's appeal.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  For example, one cult member who was unable to care for his failing eyesight died after a fall into an elevator shaft. In some groups, disease or disability is interpreted as a lack of faith, the work of demons, shirking, or something to be overcome through prayer. In others, disease is simply ignored. In yet other groups, severe illness, either medical or psychological, is cause for ejection from the group, with ill members being deposited in the emergency rooms of local hospitals or shipped home. To date there are no studies on the morbidity or mortality rates in cult groups or in the former-member population. Many anecdotal reports in the media, as well as in medical and psychological journals, suggest that involvement in cultic groups and relationships has produced a number of preventable casualties, including suicide. For example, former members of one well-known group count at least thirty-one suicides in the past thirteen years, including at least two adult children of top leaders.3 Loss of Outside SupportThe presence of family and friends and the amount of support available certainly affects a former member's ability to integrate or re-integrate into mainstream society. Many cults discourage members from continuing precult relationships. Some forbid contact with some or all family members or friends. Other cults encourage their members to maintain good relationships with family, yet they keep them so busy that meaningful contact with anyone outside the group becomes virtually impossible. And some cults promote good family relations in the hope that members will receive money, substantial gifts, or inheritances from their families. Skewed or nonexistent contact with family and former friends tends to increase isolation and susceptibility to the closed worldview of the cult. Reestablishment of those contacts will help offset the loss and loneliness former members quite naturally feel upon leaving such an intense environment. For those who grew up in but decided to leave a cult, few or no outside family or friends may exist at first. This is one of the many special challenges facing this particular population of former cult members. After Cult InvolvementVarious factors can hasten postcult healing and lessen difficulties, and many are related to the psychoeducational process. Often former members spend years in relative isolation, not talking about or dealing with their cult experiences. Shame and silence may intensify the harm done by the group and may forestall or even prevent healing. Understanding the dynamics of cult conversion and commitment is an essential part of healing and making a solid transition to an integrated postcult life.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Your new freedoms and choices become part of you. Each time you make a new choice or a new friend, each fresh accomplishment and victory-whether large or small-is a positive experience that will produce good memories. In this way, you will reinvent yourself. Obviously making changes in yourself is not going to be easy, but the most difficult part has already been accomplished: you are out of the cult and moving toward a new life. [image file=img/img0017.jpg] As you create your new your life, you will need to reestablish former relationships and figure out how to have new ones. This may raise issues of intimacy, trust, and personal boundaries. Other key challenges may include deciding on a viable belief system-after many of your deepest beliefs may have been violated or betrayed-and choosing a career or vocation that meets your needs. These issues are the focus of this chapter. Loneliness, Trust, and IntimacyOne of the single greatest difficulties former members face is isolation and loneliness. This is especially true for those who walk away without any counseling or support, or who are without a network of family, friends, or other former members. To fill the void created by the loss of the group or relationship, some people return to their cult or abusive partner, while others may join another destructive group in a pattern known as "cult hopping." When you leave a cult, you leave an intense experience. You forge strong and unique bonds through sharing ideals, goals, and values-and through mutual suffering, such as deprivation, forced confessions, or enforced intimacy. Emotional highs and mystical/spiritual experiences also magnify the sense of belonging you might have felt in the cult. Immediately after leaving, you may feel-and be-quite isolated. Precult friends may be long gone or unwilling to hear about what you went through. If you were born or raised in a cult, you may not have any personal contacts outside the context of the cult. This isolation may be intensified by the difficulty some former members have, notably soon after cult departure, explaining to others in a clear manner the dynamics of cult involvement and resocialization (or thought reform). Also intensifying isolation is the societal stigma about cult members and former cult members. Often outsiders do not believe or do not want to hear stories about life in a cult. However, establishing social and emotional networks is vital to resisting the pull to return to the cult, so it is important to reach out and try to restore former friendships and make new ones. Learning to TrustCults demand absolute trust. Anything less is considered a gross imperfection, disobedience, the sign of Satan or the enemy, and is often a punishable offense. Many devotees leave their group with a deep suspicion or skepticism about people's motivations and attitudes. The realization that their trust was profoundly abused is often accompanied by feelings of hurt, rage, and fear. The experience leaves a scar.

• From The Lives of Great Christians (2007)

  B. He spoke both Latin and a local language, probably related to modern Welsh. C. He received some education and was literate. D. As a boy, he learned the basics of Christianity. E. When Patrick was about 16, he was captured by a raiding party and brought to Ireland as a slave. 1. For six years, Patrick was a slave, spending much time as a shepherd. a. He learned the language of the Irish. b. As a shepherd, he spent a good deal of time alone and thought deeply about the God whom he worshiped. 2. Patrick was able to escape after about six years and returned to Britain to be reunited to his family. IV. Shortly after returning to Britain, Patrick experienced a call to go back to Ireland and bring Christianity to the land in which he had been enslaved. A. After an uncertain number of years in which Patrick lived in Britain, he was made a missionary bishop and sent to Ireland. B. The traditional date for the beginning of Patrick’s mission was 432, but in fact, he may have arrived a generation later than that. C. There had been some sort of Christian mission to Ireland in 431, but for reasons we do not know, it was unsuccessful. V. The only contemporary or near-contemporary records we have of Patrick and his activities come from two letters he wrote. A. The earliest account of Patrick’s life was not written until more than 200 years after he lived. B. His first letter, called his Confession, contains a great deal of autobiographical information; however, it describes conditions more than events during his time in Ireland. C. His other letter is addressed to soldiers of a man named Coroticus. VI. Ireland had almost no written language, and politically, it was divided into numerous petty kingdoms; this suggests what a difficult and, at times, lonely mission Patrick undertook. ©2007 The Teaching Company. 31

• From Wild (2012)

  I’d planned to order with reserve, especially since I’d spent another fifty cents that afternoon doing laundry, going in together with Greg. But once we sat down I hadn’t been able to keep myself from matching Greg’s every move—ordering a rum and Coke along with dinner, saying yes to the garlic bread. I tried not to let on that I was adding up the bill in my head as we ate. Greg already knew how unprepared I’d been to hike the PCT. He didn’t need to know that there was yet another front on which I was an absolute fool. But a fool I was. After we got our bill, tacked on a tip, and split it down the middle, I had sixty-five cents. Back in my room after dinner, I opened The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California to read about the next section of the trail. My next stop was a place called Belden Town, where my resupply box with a twenty-dollar bill inside would be waiting. I could get through to Belden on sixty-five cents, couldn’t I? I’d be in the wilderness, after all, and I wouldn’t have anywhere to spend my money anyway, I reasoned, though still I felt anxious. I wrote Lisa a letter, asking her to purchase and send me a PCT guidebook for the Oregon section of the trail using the bit of money I’d left with her, and reordering the boxes she’d be mailing me for the rest of California. I went over the list again and again, making sure I had it all correct, lining up the miles with the dates and the places. When I turned off my light and lay on my creaky bed to sleep, I could hear Greg on the other side of the wall shifting around on his creaky bed too, his closeness as palpable as his distance. Hearing him there made me feel so lonely I would’ve howled with pain if I’d let myself. I didn’t know exactly why. I didn’t want anything from him and yet also I wanted everything. What would he do if I knocked on his door? What would I do if he let me in? I knew what I would do. I’d done it so many times. “I’m like a guy, sexually,” I’d told a therapist I’d seen a couple of times the year before—a man named Vince who volunteered at a community clinic in downtown Minneapolis where people like me could go to talk to people like him for ten bucks a pop. “What’s a guy like?” he’d asked.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  “It’s been a year,” she said to me. “Everyone at home said to give it a year, that it takes time to get to know people, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be this slow. I know I have some bad habits: after work, I mostly just stay in, get online, watch TV. I’m scared to put myself out there. Everyone said I was brave to move here, but now I’m wondering if it was stupid.” She blinked back tears. “Why can’t I find people I can connect with?” she said. “It’s embarrassing, but I even Googled ‘how to make friends’ and everything just says to go to meetups or join a book club. Or volunteer. Everything says to volunteer. I’m not an idiot. I know that stuff. And that’s not it. I can find a book club. It’s walking into the book club and trying to think of things to say for an hour that’s hard. What am I supposed to say to these people? I run out of things to say after, ‘Hi, I’m Maddy.’” Nora, by contrast, knows lots of people. Nora is a stay-at-home mom with two kids and knows all the other moms by name from school, scouts, or soccer. She waves and says hi, exchanges small talk, and though the other moms are friendly, Nora notices they’re a bit formal with her, unsure of how to respond. “No one knows me,” Nora says. “I’m always the person who is the last to meet everyone. People always say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize you didn’t know each other.’ I know a lot of people on a shallow, acquaintance level, and I have a couple of close friends, but I’d like to branch out. I have lots of friends on Facebook, but I know that’s not real. The only person I’d really be okay confiding in is my husband. I’m always the outsider, and I’m not sure exactly how that happens. I see people talking easily about random stuff, and it’s such a mystery. I’m not sure how to get to that point.” Even without social anxiety, making friends as an adult is hard. A meta-analysis of 177,000 participants in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin found that social circles expand until early adulthood and then shrink from there. Back in 2006, a large-scale survey found that more than half (53 percent) of Americans didn’t have any confidants who weren’t family. A quarter of American adults—one in four—had no confidants at all. Over ten years later, I’d be willing to bet the percentage has crept even higher. Mix social anxiety with other challenges, like Maddy’s moving to a new city, the dispersion of graduation, getting clean or sober, going through an upheaval like divorce, or simply realizing you’ve had your nose to the grindstone so long that everyone has drifted away, and it can feel like you have to start from scratch but have no idea how this game works.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I feel his love, his longing, his loneliness, as well as his acceptance of being invisible. He is the one who is there, but it’s as if he doesn’t exist, as if he is the dead child, and his dead sister is the one who is still alive inside his mother. We sit in silence for a long minute and I realize that in my silence I might become Jon’s neglectful mother, of whom he asks nothing. Very often and without awareness, the therapist joins the patient’s childhood scenario, taking the role of one of their caretakers. Childhood attachments shape the therapeutic relationship in the same way that they form other relationships outside therapy. Those who expect to be loved often make sure others love them, while those who expect to be neglected might evoke neglect. Our goal as therapists is to examine those patterns; to ask ourselves in what ways our patients relive their early relationships with us, to question who we become to them, and to process those old attachments while creating new, different ones . As with his mother, Jon doesn’t ask me for much. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I have a baby now, and I know how hard it is. Since Jenny was born, I constantly think about my parents. They had five kids. One of them died, can you imagine? They had to take care of three young children and a baby in the aftermath of her death. No one can do that,” he concludes. “Mom was broken. So yes. She ignored me.” Jon isn’t angry with his mother simply because, even after she died, he still longs for her. The more neglectful she was, the more his need and longing for her increased. As a child, he had no other source of security. He tried to see her as “good” because he preferred to have a neglectful mother than no mother at all. I realize that it is easier for him to identify with his mother and with her loss than to imagine himself as a child and recognize his own pain. Unconsciously, however, he keeps repeating the pattern of neglect: fighting his unsatisfied needs and worrying about all the other ways the world might reject him. Jon searches the room. Suddenly he points at my desk and says, “I think I forgot Jenny’s pacifier here last week.” “Yes,” I say as I look at my desk and recall placing it there so I would remember to give it back to him. Jon seems unsatisfied with my one-word answer, as if he was expecting a different one. It is the first time I see him a little disappointed . “Tell me more,” I respond to the expression on his face. “Don’t you think there was a reason that I forgot it here? There must be a reason, right?” I see that he invites me to look deeper, to search for more. “What do you think the reason is?”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She needs to see me as immune, invulnerable, as living outside the rules of reality in which we are all survivors or survivors-to-be. It helps her see me as strong enough to be with her, but nevertheless that need to see me as pain-free leaves her alone again, connected to idealized others and with the feeling that no one can truly know her. “I feel so alone,” she says, and I share with her the feeling that we all need another human to bear witness and accompany us on the emotional journey of life, another person who can accept our feelings and process them with us. We need to be known . When Naomi was a child, her pain wasn’t recognized and thus she couldn’t make sense of it and had to deny it. The emotional holding that parents provide for their children is about accompanying them in their lives, giving names to their feelings, helping them tolerate the intense emotions that come with being alive. Now Naomi gets in touch with her loneliness, conflicted about trusting that I could understand, aware of her worry of knowing too much about her own pain as well as about Isabella’s. It is only when we process our own sorrow that we can offer a truthful space of mutual vulnerability and emotional honesty, a place where we can recognize the other and don’t try to know better, to fix or give optimistic advice. Instead we are available to be with, listen, and bear our own pain with the pain of another human. In the last few weeks of Isabella’s life, Naomi sits with Isabella’s family next to her hospice bed, holding her hand. Isabella’s older child goes to school and acts as if nothing is happening. It is always confusing to witness the way children deal with loss, to understand the things they are worried about that may sound trivial (“Who is going to put me to bed at night?”) and not to confuse their dissociated state with lack of care or to blame them for being selfish. Grief is a tricky and unpredictable creature. It changes its face every minute and often appears in disguise. In some ways, in those unbearable moments, we are all children who need someone to tell us that there is life after death. Lying in her bed, Isabella becomes more and more disconnected. “I feel far away,” she tells Naomi. “I looked in the mirror today and I felt that I had already left.” Naomi tells me about her guilt and the pain of separation. “She is agitated and angry,” she says. “I constantly feel that I have done something wrong, that I could be more helpful, that I could do it better.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Even one question would have been enough, so we wouldn’t have to sit there in silence. I wished that he would wonder out loud if I liked the spreads and which one I liked most. I would point to the hazelnut chocolate, and maybe then I could tell him about Little Red Riding Hood’s basket that we packed just before the end of the session and how I put unhealthy candy in it and nothing else. I wished that he would smile and say that he knew I loved sweets because he noticed that I ordered the spreads after therapy every time. But he didn’t ask anything, and I wasn’t sure that he noticed what I was eating or anything else about me.” Lara pauses and looks straight into my eyes. “There are many questions from my childhood that were never asked. There was no grown-up who could know the answers. There is a mystery that I wasn’t able to resolve on my own,” she says, and I know what she is talking about. Lara and I start meeting again once a week. She begins her doctoral program, trying to find the topic for her dissertation, her “me-search.” Her mind will lead us to the questions that were never asked. Her research question will be born in that void and so will the truth. It is a winter day when Lara comes in holding an old picture; in it she is thirteen years old, with a backpack on her shoulders. She is wearing gym clothes and is smiling at the camera. “This is from the time before my parents got divorced,” she says, and I recognize the girl in the picture; she looks very much like the girl I knew. “I will never forget that day; it’s when I got my period for the first time. My mother took this picture and then called my grandmother to tell her that the ‘aunt was visiting’ or something funny like that.” She pauses. “I heard them fighting for the first time. My mother was crying and yelling at my grandmother. I couldn’t hear what my grandmother was saying but I knew it was bad. I knew she made my mother very upset and I felt terrible. I thought it was all because of me. “It was the one time I remember asking directly: ‘Mom, what happened?’ “‘It’s nothing; it’s between me and Grandma,’ my mother said, but I didn’t give up. ‘What did she say? Why are you crying?’” Hanna told Lara that her mother had asked her to cut Lara’s hair short. “My mother told me that and started crying again. She thought it was the meanest thing one could do to a girl. She thought it was crazy. She told me that when she was about my age and got her period for the first time, my grandmother took her to the barber and without further explanation had her hair cut short.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I was fast, I was good, I was compulsive, and I was relentless with my hook and thread—everyone in my family wore some strange woolly item I had made for them. I always had several projects going simultaneously, so my hands never rested . Stitchery, I see now, was a perfect repository for my ambitious anal tendencies: each article grew in a controlled and foreseeable manner, and was not subject to the irrational chaos of my existential anxieties. I crocheted my way right through adolescence while sewing ribbons on my toe shoes and attempting to emulate the ethereal faith of my peers. I believe now that dancing is about two things: good behavior and faith made visible. For me the first was easy, the second impossible—hence more desirable. Being a dancer was my earliest, and perhaps most earnest, attempt to have faith. But it was like trying to be a nun without believing in God. I had effort in abundance, but I could not will faith. Denying myself food all day long while dancing all day long seemed a good place to begin trying, however. At least I was exercising some self-control, making sure that my body would be as svelte as those belonging to the believing girls. I could do that part without God. Just don’t eat until the evening. It felt good. Powerful. With food—or, rather, without food—I could compete with the believers. Why, I could even be thinner than a few of them. I learned early how to transcend pain, deny pain: the bloody toes and strained tendons, the horrid loneliness of being an atheist. Very useful. If I could deny enough, I reasoned, perhaps I could even deny my denial of God. I became a professional dancer at age seventeen and began performing in public eight times a week. It was then that I started crossing myself before going onstage. I had seen the best dancer in all the world do this, and I thought perhaps this was her secret. So I tried it, in the wings, alone, unseen, before an entrance. It was like performing one more step in the ballet. I wanted it to mean something. And it did. Though it did not bring God into my consciousness, it did demonstrate my belief that ritual was the way to invoke Him, in the unlikely event that He should ever be willing to take me on. On tour in Paris one summer, I started collecting rosaries from the antique stores on the Boulevard St. Germain—old ones, with chips in the mother-of-pearl. I figured that if they were old and European they would already be suffused by the faith of previous believers and thus, despite my miserable Darwinism, some of their faith might rub off on me. I wore one as a necklace for a while, though I was told it was sacrilege.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘And all this brings me back to myself, for I too have been changing in some curious way. The old self-sufficient life has transformed itself into something a little hollow, a little empty. It no longer answers my deepest needs. Somewhere deep inside a tide seems to have turned in my nature. I do not know why but it is towards you, my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more and more of late. Can one be frank? Is there a friendship possible this side of love which could be sought and found? I speak no more of love — the word and its conventions have become odious to me. But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind? But perhaps this is not the sort of problem which will interest you much these days. Once or twice I have felt the absurd desire to come to you and offer my services in looking after the child perhaps. But it seems clear now that you do not really need anybody any more, and that you value your solitude above all things.…’ There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription. * * * * * The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines — so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them — I mean a black patch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings.… Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything* depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? So that.… [image file=image_rsrc1AV.jpg] WORKPOINTS Landscape-tones: steep skylines, low cloud, pearl ground with shadows in oyster and violet. Accidie. On the lake gunmetal and lemon. Summer: sand lilac sky. Autumn: swollen bruise greys. Winter: freezing white sand, clear skies, magnificent starscapes. * * *