1/17/20
For quite a few years now, I’ve characterized myself as a ghost. Dramatic, I know, but this is my newsletter so stick with me for a second. In the movie montage of my life, I am a ghost that whips through walls and evades the laws of gravity and causes mischief with no real repercussions a la Peeves from Harry Potter. It’s a comfort dream where I feel lighter and less serious, but it’s also a hidey-hole for some ugliness in my heart. My specter self has vaporous emotions – unrecognizable and transitory. She’s overlooked and unseen, and her footprints never leave an imprint – a ghost girl. She’s a character in my head who bears the weight of all the tiny painful moments that begin to pile up as the sun rises and that threaten to topple over by the time I curl up in bed at night. She feels them all in their fullness – not the way that I do, halfway and only when I’m in the mood or caught off-guard.
Over time, I’ve learned to recognize when she is showing up in a not-so-helpful way. I become super sensitive, tense. I shut myself off from friends, screen phone calls, sleep all the time. My poetry sounds like it’s coming from the diary of a fifteen year old because “no one understands me”. The thing that the ghost girl movie version of myself forgets, the thing that I have to remember, is that understanding requires presence. Communication. Sitting on a couch with my best friend and feeling something, calling my mom and owning up to my shit. The brutally honest truth I need to hear is that my problems will continue to be problems until I change something, even the tiniest something. An attitude, a word, a movement. Loneliness isn’t cured when I’m alone in my bedroom – it’s broken down over time with appeals at connection (look up psychologist John Gottman’s concept of “bids”).
Alternatively, I really believe that everything has its time and that we can often stand to up our emotional pain tolerance – sometimes you’re just lonely, right? It’s human and illuminating. But I dunno, maybe we can get in the habit of baking pies when we’re lonely and I’ll just show up at your door with some pumpkin goodness and we can be lonely together?
Lightly,
Leah
it’s funny how safe we feel
in the patterns of our problems.
my loneliness
begets loneliness
because i see the world
through my lonely eyes –
an unlonely world
emerges out of
the expectation for connection,
but i greet each outstretched hand
like it’s incapable
of reaching under my surface.
avoid the gaze of long-lashed eyes
in equal fear
of either possibility –
that they’ll stop on the surface where they land
or that they’ll probe deeper
LNK
Leah Kepley, M.Ed. 