Forever Alone | Chapter 5: Highlands & High Expectations (Part 3)
In which I encounter a hot Scottish man on a train, zero in on a future mother-in-law, break up with the Universe, and finally drag myself to therapy.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
One of the hardest, most exhausting things about singledom was summed up perfectly by Lori Gottlieb, therapist and author of the book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. In her column Dear Therapist, which she writes for The Atlantic, a single woman asked, “How do I tell my friends I really don't want to hear about the problems they are having in their relationships? It is really hard for me to listen to them complain about their spouses or significant others when I am fighting hard to accept being single.”
Lori’s reply is worth repeating, word for word: “What your friends might not realize is that many single people who long for a partner experience something called ambiguous loss or ambiguous grief. It’s a type of grieving, but it’s different from the grieving someone might do after a concrete loss like the death of a spouse from, say, cancer.
In ambiguous grief, there’s a murkiness to the loss. Lots of people experience ambiguous grief, not only those hoping to find a partner. A husband or wife may experience it if their partner is still alive but can no longer live with them or recognize them because of a disease like Alzheimer’s. A woman might experience it if she is trying and unable to get pregnant, though she has not lost a child. And a single person hoping to meet someone might experience it in the lack of a partner he or she longs for but hasn’t met.
Ambiguous grief isn’t more or less painful than other types of grief—it’s just different. But one thing that does make it additionally challenging is that it tends to go unacknowledged. There are no condolence cards directed at the person whose spouse is there physically but not cognitively, or the person who can’t have the child she dreams of, or the person whose imagined partner has never appeared. There are no community rituals in place to support these people in their grief. They don’t get to take a day off work because they’re heartbroken that yet another promising date turned out to be a dud and they’re back in the throes of ambiguous grief. Instead, their grief goes largely unnoticed.”
Ambiguous grief manifests for me in so many ways. But one of the most tangible is how much, for years upon years, I’ve felt like a bystander, waiting on the sidelines, watching other people live their life. In the time I’ve been single, I’ve watched my older brother meet a girl, move in with her, get engaged, get married, and become a dad four times over. I’ve watched my younger brother meet a girl, get engaged, get married, do three moves across three continents, and become a dad twice. There’s no need to name all the friends for whom I could write similar lists.
If you’re tempted to defend me, you might say, “Wait, but you’ve done stuff, too!” And that’s undoubtedly true. In the time I’ve been single I’ve moved twice, bought a condo, started a business, quit multiple jobs, supported myself financially on solely my own power and creativity, been published online at some major outlets, started two podcasts, and sincerely impacted the lives of more people than I can probably count. And that’s to say nothing about how much I’ve grown and evolved as a person, which can’t be said of everyone, regardless of how many milestones they’ve checked off. My list isn’t shabby. I’m proud of it. And … I still feel like I’m on the outside, looking in. I still feel a sense of loss over something I’ve never gotten to have.
I told my new therapist, Leanne, that I felt like a rock in the woods. All around me, the circle of life is in perpetual motion. The trees change color before shedding their leaves, snow falls, life blooms again and bursts forth. Animals scurry about—old ones die, and new babies are born to take their place. Water flows nearby, sometimes in a gush and other times a trickle.
Nothing is ever the same … except the rock. Seasons change, years pass, and the rock is in the same spot. It’s not part of the circle of life; it’s just a witness to it.
I cried, hard, when I told Leanne that I didn’t want to be a bystander. I desperately wanted to be part of that sacred cycle. I wanted to get married, have children, have grandchildren. One day, yes, I would die—but that’s something I could be more at peace with, if I felt like it was the natural conclusion to a circle of life I’d gotten to fully participate in.
“Life doesn’t feel very meaningful if I’m not part of that,” I said. “But I don’t know that I have any power to change it, either. If I could have made it happen, I would have already. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I’m too much. Too loud, too opinionated, too intense. There has to be a reason someone is single for as long as I’ve been.”
Leanne let me get it all out. Over the course of five months, she heard every bit of doubt, fear, suspicion, rage, grief, and hopelessness I’d been accumulating for years. She never said anything particularly profound, which isn’t a dismissal of her abilities as a therapist. In fact, I think therapy worked exactly the way it’s supposed to: It gave me a safe space to externally process all of my feelings, and it held me accountable for questioning my thoughts.
It helped that Leanne had a spiritual bent to her. She reminded me, often, that we humans are only capable of perceiving 1% of matter in the Universe. The other 99%? Who knows. So, if all you can see is just a tiny sliver of what exists … how can you possibly form a definite conclusion about reality based on that? There’s a lot of mystery and magic and infinite possibility in the other 99%. To say you know anything for sure, including what’s unfolding in your own life, is not only factually incorrect, but also a little egotistical. Maybe, instead of spending so much time and energy fretting about the fraction of reality you can observe, convinced it’s true, it would pay to spend more energy on what could be true.
Even as a coach, it’s easy to forget that not every thought you think is automatically true. The most insidious thing about depression is that, when you’re in it, it feels the most true—while in reality, anything you see through the lens of depression is always the most skewed. In those eight months that I spiraled deeper and deeper into depression, I’d started to believe all of my thoughts. I knew I was the rock in the woods. I knew that the Universe had betrayed me. I knew there was something irrevocably broken about me, that explained why I was so incapable of getting what I wanted. And when you’re dead-set on knowing something, there’s no room for anything else to be true. You close yourself off to hope, to possibility, to being pleasantly surprised by how wrong you were.
Therapy was a place I went to un-know things; a place I visited often enough that it was hard to slip back into my previous state of angry, wounded certainty. Every good doubt I harbored—that maybe the Universe still had my back; that maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with me; that maybe I could still be part of the circle of life—was like screwing a light bulb back into the string along the tunnel.
Slowly, I returned to myself. I didn’t cry as often. I felt more even-keeled. I was more hopeful, more able to enjoy the small things in life. That, in and of itself, was a victory. But clawing myself up and out of that pit did something else for me, too—it proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that my mental health was not contingent upon what I did or didn’t get in life. To feel better, despite nothing having changed externally, was something I wouldn’t have believed was possible a year earlier.
Up until then, despite how much inner work I’d done, and despite my career as a coach, I’d still never fully understood my depression. I’d attributed all of my worst times to external events—Leaving home, being away from a boyfriend, going through a breakup, hating my job, my best friend dating an asshole, being single for years on end. Therapy made me see that yeah, what life throws at you can and does impact how you feel—the ambiguous loss is real and deserves to be felt, and honored. But that makes tending to your mental health all the more critical. If life is going to be hard and tender and exhausting much of the time, you owe it to yourself to be able to weather those realities in the healthiest way possible. Your mental health is a muscle, and the more you exercise it, the more resilient, peaceful, grounded, clear, content, and energetic you become, which makes you far less likely to fall into a deep, dark pit when life isn’t going your way.
Albert Einstein once said, and I paraphrase, “The most important decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to believe in a friendly or hostile Universe.”
For a long time, depression had me living in a hostile Universe—a place where nothing had meaning; where, at best, there was a higher intelligence that felt neutral about my existence, and at worst, where I was being actively punished for my brokenness.
Therapy helped return me to a friendly Universe—a place where things might not always make sense, but where you’re always being encouraged and supported; where there’s plenty of reason to have hope. But it also helped me see that friendly Universe in a more nuanced, mature light. Did I really believe that those years’ worth of guidance, signs, and synchronicities were completely random? That they meant nothing? That they were leading me nowhere? No, I couldn’t dismiss those things. They must have some kind of meaning.
But was it possible I didn’t fully understand how the Universe worked? That maybe I’d received guidance, and assumed I knew exactly what it meant, and on what timeline it was supposed to happen … but that maybe it’s not as direct or easy to interpret as I’d wanted it to be? And maybe much of my disappointment wasn’t the Universe letting me down, but me grasping onto certainty about what was “supposed” to be happening, because of how deeply attached I was to getting what I wanted … only to be disenchanted when it didn’t go the way I thought it should, on the timeline I deemed “correct.”
After months of therapy, I was willing to hand my trust back over to the Universe. I didn’t feel betrayed anymore. But forcing myself to be honest about my assumptions—the ones I’d made about what the guidance had meant, and how the Universe worked—made me want to be more honest about everything. And even though I no longer believed my singledom was the result of something deeply wrong with me, I did suspect that, on some level, there were still hard truths that I was avoiding—things that might very well be blocking me from having the relationship I craved; things that not even the Universe could overcome, as long as I was committed to avoiding them. So, I decided to go there. That’s next time, on Forever Alone.
This was Chapter 5: Part 3 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 6: Part 1!