Solitude as Sustenance, or, Singing the Pain

June 15, 2015June 15, 2015Kaelyn Leave a comment

The United States has always boasted a highly individualistic culture. Children generally move out of their parents’ home once they reach 18, people are encouraged more and more to pursue their own goals (men have enjoyed this privilege for ages–women only recently), etc. It is not at all like Ecuador where being single, for example, is regarded as anomalous or where the heteronormative trajectory of life is all but holy writ (i.e. get married, have kids, live life for said kids, rinse and repeat). But even in the country that coined the term “rugged individualism”, the idea of solitude, of being alone, remains a point of fear for many; so much so that they would rather settle for mediocrity–in relationships, in jobs–than risk ever being or feeling alone.

But for me, solitude is something I crave, something necessary in order to maintain a sense of balance in my life. I’m a very social person–there are few things I enjoy more than sitting with friends, talking and laughing without restraint. But there are days, like today, where I wake up and think “Today I want no one’s company but my own.” It is in this state of solitude in which I am at my most productive. I write, read, cook… I even clean. The solitude fills in the cracks I hadn’t even noticed and makes me feel level. This has worked for me in many different stages of my life and in many ways allowed me to become the (arguably) whole and sane person I am.

During the Dark Ages (high school era), I would often go to the beach at night, alone. Sometimes I wrote angsty, hormone-riddled poems (and sometimes good ones) or cry or punch the steering wheel, or open the window and close my eyes while breathing in the salt-tinged air and listening only to the ceaselessly crashing waves. The ocean always made me feel small and, consequently, enacted the same magic on the size of my problems. I did this at moments when I thought I might burst from the tension, anger, heartbreak, and sense of betrayal that shaped those years and so severely warped the way I interacted with those around me, making me question who I thought I was. True solitude can be so difficult to find as a teenager, and yet if I hadn’t found a way to do so, I would have been lost.

Years later, in another–possibly darker–period, I would wander alone through the streets of San Francisco. I went to movies by myself, to restaurants I had wanted to try, to coffee shops, bookstores, and bars, both upscale and divey. In these places I watched other people as they often watched me, the young, pretty girl sitting alone over a latte gone cold or a half-eaten plate of bolognese. I tried to read in the lines of their faces and the shapes of their bodies whether they had the same scars as I and, if so, how they had moved on from the point of injury. I allowed food and leftover pain pills and the laughter of strangers and the penumbra of empty movie theaters to fill the yawning emptiness inside of me. This brand of solitude didn’t heal me, but there are times in life when distraction is salvation, and it gave me that.

Solo travel takes solitude to an entirely different level. It becomes unavoidable–interminable bus rides, rooms in hostels in strange border towns, the knowledge that you are carrying all you need with you on your own back with no one’s help. This kind of solitude is one of the greatest of life’s teachers. Nothing else will tell you so much and with so much brutal honesty about your strengths and weaknesses. It breaks you and then puts you back together, like a bone, stronger at the site of the break. It is the scariest and most rewarding kind of solitude I can think of–a drug that never leaves your system.

But the solitude I woke up seeking today was of an entirely different strain. If that latter period of my life was darkness, this one is pure light. I am putting every fiber of myself towards finding contentment and joy and my spot in the world. I am beta-testing dreams I’ve had for as long as I can remember. I’m pushing the boundaries of my own independence by living unsupported and unfettered in a foreign country. I have people in my life, both new and well-established, who love and accept my most authentic self and I theirs. My moments of solitude now are not about holding myself together but about letting the world in and allowing myself to be grateful for everything I have been given and have gotten for myself. They are moments of quiet joy, of tactile pleasures, of enjoying the capabilities of my own flesh, of acknowledging my own inherent power in creating and defining my own experience. Solitude is finding my center and using it as a baseboard for launching myself once again into the unpredictable nebula of the next moment.

The Dark and Damp Undersides of Bravery

March 6, 2015Kaelyn 1 Comment

Traveling for me is such an overwhelmingly positive experience that the brief moments of negativity maintain a tenuous hold at most when I look back. My memory barely snags on the missed flights, the fear-induced sleeplessness, the tearful goodbyes. Years from now, when my restlessness has been tamed (by infirmity most likely), I will reflect on my wild youth and remember people I met once and never again, night skies gazed upon from the bottom of a canoe, the pleasure of fulfillment and freedom, of living a life so open I could not touch its edges if I stretched my arms to their limit.

This is not to say that I do not feel the full weight of those few less than happy moments that are so inevitable.

I finally made it back to Cuenca after three months at home and although throughout the entire trip (which included two layovers and a five-hour bus ride) I felt proud and excited, once my bags were unpacked and I had stopped moving, I was rendered practically catatonic by a feeling of dread, of loss. Suddenly there was a marquee invading the darkness behind my eyes that read in bold, jagged script: “What have you done!?” And behind the marquee trailed a caravan, each vehicle carrying its own individual anxiety — not enough money! No family! No backup plan! On and on around a circular track in my brain this caravan went, depriving me of my confidence, my courage, even sleep.

But somewhere in me there is also a spark that speaks rationally, and it told me that this was just a reaction to odyssey, that it had happened before and will again. It reminded me that I am living my life by my own rules and that even the bravest sometimes shrink from the shadow they themselves cast. And so I let the negative feelings wash through until all that was left was a residue of caution, something necessary to any adventure.

Each day that I live my life like this I am carving myself, my identity, out of the clay, so that one day, decades hence, when adventure lives mostly in my muscle memory, I will know exactly who I am and how I came to be.

La Güera Encounters an Old Frienemy

December 9, 2014Kaelyn 1 Comment

The other night, I was sitting on my mom’s couch, flipping between Space Jam and Pirates of the Caribbean and trying to quash a surprisingly insistent desire to be in the company of someone else. It wouldn’t have mattered really who it was, although the closer it was appropriate for me to press my body to theirs the better, but I was overwhelmed with this need for there to be another other with me. I cajoled and wooed a few people but to no avail and so I sat there and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. After so long on my own, why did I feel as though solitude was suddenly a liquid weight that was making me sluggish and, in a way, scared? After a while it dawned on me: I was feeling alone because for the first time in five months I was alone; really, truly alone.

On my trip I had been a single person huddled in the window seat of buses, an individual trying to devour new cities and their personalities through something akin to osmosis, one girl among many in dormitories that peppered the entire northern seaboard of the South American continent, but in truth I was absolutely never alone. And in that moment, with my mom gone to her boyfriend’s and my friends and the man from whom I want what I can not have unavailable, I was alone. Suddenly I was missing the presence of a front desk staff or that of familiar strangers lounging on couches or in hammocks in my periphery. I hadn’t realized that I had been in a constant state of being in the presence of others, but the sudden absence of it completely upset my equilibrium and made me want to hug myself tightly enough to leave marks on my own skin. I had come home to an old nemesis, a cousin to the kind I had felt while traveling: loneliness.

Solitude has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. Anyone to whom reading is a beloved pastime is familiar and friendly with it. But the comfortable solitude that necessarily accompanies reading aside, I have often sought solitude as a way to allow myself to feel things without the filter of other people’s perceptions, to bask in the universality of finding oneself alone in one’s own body, less than a mere speck in the grand scheme of the universe. I could not be without it, but solitude’s more insidious and subtle twin, loneliness, has always been more problematic for me.

While traveling alone, you often feel unprotected and vulnerable as a result of your singleness, more so I think if you happen to be a woman. Solitude and loneliness are the price you pay for the unforgettable experiences and seemingly insuperable vexations, the travel delays and accidental epiphanies. But somehow, for me at least, the loneliness I encountered on the road was manageable, vanquished by taking a walk in my new surroundings or curling up in a hammock and losing myself in a book. I think the fact that I was virtually constantly on the move, changing locations almost as often as underwear, was a salve for whatever pesky loneliness wormed its way into my heart. There wasn’t a lack of arms into which I could have fallen either (that age-old cure), whether they belonged to men who were looking for a temporary fix, competitive in their need, or to those whose goals were more long-term, which manifested in a possessive, often jealous desire. And I did fall once or twice, but I always kicked the sheets off the next day with a revivifying understanding that what I was looking for was not a cure for loneliness, but something much deeper. I neither wanted nor needed to find someone to “permanently” assuage my loneliness as it could only serve to complicate.

But every so often I would feel pangs of misplaced yearning, a sense of loss for something that I had never had any claim to. For instance there was a boy in Peru, to whom I refer as my Prince Charming, who took me in hand and kept me there when I had to get stitches in my leg. Before the “incident” we had learned bits and pieces about each other, including the fact that we were going in opposite directions. That’s something you become accustomed to when meeting people along the way, in hostels and on tours: there is a sweet temporariness to any relationship, an innate understanding of both the beginning and the end (though some things surprise you). You know before you’ve spoken a word that your roads will lead you different places, and this meeting is only one tiny topographical point on the map. But somehow, this boy I hardly knew held me together and instead of crying I spent the night laughing. Later on, wearing his shirt and breathing in the smell of him, I felt a sweet nostalgia for an imagined future. But it was only a passing thing, as opposed to a more clinging kind of regret.

While traveling it is easy for me to remember and find comfort in the fact that I am, at this point in my life, too wild and erratic and impulsive for someone to hold me still long enough to pin their hopes on me. It is at home, however, where that confidence falters a bit, the devil-may-care attitude fails to carry me through, and I begin to regret in a small but powerful way that I am not a person to whom longer-term relationships come easily, simply because of that pesky fact that you kind of need to be physically near a person for it to work.

Now I’ve been home for two weeks and in that time I have watched, to my chagrin, the shape of my itinerant loneliness change into something more sedentary, and therefore heavier. There is something about being back in familiar surroundings, where most things seem to have changed very little that tends to make my singlehood rankle, where suddenly something in my subconscious rears its ugly head and seems to say “Single? Still?” It is obvious to me now that my priorities are travel and experience and wonder as opposed to romance and the kind of comfort one feels waking up in the half-light of morning to the sound of someone else’s breathing and the warmth of someone else’s skin. Unfortunately, the fact that I have mentally decided this has little to no effect on my heart and body’s desire for the latter. This is evidence to me that there is truth in that hackneyed and often annoying refrain: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” In the end (and also in the beginning), it all comes down to choices and at least I can take comfort in the fact that I have made mine.

This loneliness, this feeling of need, is a price I am willing to pay for the marvels I have seen and for the limitless experiences that await only my courage.