At 22, with the engine of my profound unhappiness grinding into gear, I spent hour upon hour lost in daydreams. I imagined surviving my heavy depression by picking up trash on the streets of Berkeley, sleeping in a friend's double-door closet, and spending a year in total silence. This was at the point, of course, when my meals were rice cakes and I passed the time studying nude black and white photographs in dusty neighborhood bookshops, searching for my body in print.
I couldn't understand the world or my place in it, and knew full well that the spinning earth would not stop for me. And so I decided I would stop myself for the earth -- to breathe and be still. The streets, I figured, would offer up lessons I needed to learn; the closet would cramp and confine me, keeping me safe; and silence would allow me to decipher the thick clatter in my head before it came tumbling out, embarassing me.
It was during this time that I roamed the moonlit streets of Berkeley testing my naive yet vacuous state of being. A friend who waited tables at a local hole-in-the-wall would let me in after hours and steam milk for me, carefully pouring it into a tall clear glass and straining everything out but the foam which I'd eat with a spoon. He would offer me left-over berry pie which I'd fervently decline, choosing instead to walk back out into the night to measure my footfalls against my shallow breath.
Looking back, this was not my best time. Clearly, I was lost. Fresh out of college and reeling from a disastrous relationship, I was back in my hometown with nothing more to do but cope quite destructively. I read Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf; wrote long, never-mailed letters to friends; and meandered down wooded paths searching for just the right hillside to carve a nest in. It occurs to me now that I was more animal than girl back then. If I could have used my hands to dig myself a home, I would have disappeared into the earth.
Years later, searching for myself in yet another bookstore, I found Anne LaBastille's memoir, Woodswoman. I was in recovery at the time, fresh out of the hospital, and looking for some sort of grounding. Entranced, I read how this woman's disappointment and displacement led her to build a cabin in the Adirondack wilderness. She was lost and then found, building a life for herself in an unfamiliar place. It was she who became more animal than woman, surviving in the dense and distant woods for 10 years, persisting on the wisdom that, "the forest remains; the skies keep twinkling; and human beings keep striving."
Shortly after reading Woodswoman, I became pregnant with my daughter and my wandering woodsy dreams galvanized into something else entirely.
For reasons I have yet to understand, these two distinct lifetimes keep playing over and over in my mind: months of quiet hibernation and literary trips to the forest. I must have something in common with these young, searching selves.
In the last couple of months, I have watched myself slowly slip away from friends, ideas, habits, recreation, ways of communicating, passions, even my sure-footed, hard-earned okay-ness. It's almost as though I have willingly sacrificed the walls that hold me together in order to fall completely apart. But why?
Another memory recurs -- sitting at a table with six women: four eating disorder patients and two counselors. On this day, I vascillated between the two roles, pleading with my fellow patients to let go in order to hold on. I remember saying, "Sometimes you have to say goodbye to everything in order to find the one thing that will keep you going." I went on, "I've lost my home, my relationships, my friends, everything...and I'm still okay." Their resistance was the same as mine had been once: if I lose everything, surely that will be the end of me, too. Not true, I said. Lose everything and find yourself.
Lose everything. And find yourself.
It's hard being a mom and remembering at the end of the day that I matter, too. It's almost as if I battle with my own life, fighting even the people around me just to hear myself speak. I constantly wonder: is anyone listening? Does anyone care? The good news is that the loneliness that once sliced through me like violent lightning is now nothing more than a ghost limb, itching and burning with distant sensations every once in a while. I am wounded but intact, surprised sometimes by how balanced I've become.
The feeling of being lost within my own life, though, has returned with a ruthless force, only now the paths I once imagined might deliver me back into my body and my mind are blocked. A vow of silence is no longer practical: how would I cajole Adela into bed at night if not with a frustrated tone? Disappearing into the woods is no longer an option when kindergarten Open House is this Thursday. Voluntarily collecting trash, no matter how meditative, isn't going to put food on the table. And sleeping in a closet, while womblike and warm, will -- let's face it -- alarm my daughter. Even nighttime walks, as necessary as they once were (and still are, damn it), aren't possible after bedtime if no one else is around to bear the responsibility.
What I've decided, after ample afternoons of weeping, is that my lost self isn't just going to reappear. There is no way it can. I haven't taken a wrong turn or misplaced my map. No, I've gone far beyond a simple misstep or navigational error. I'm lost, well and good. The woods are dark, I have no idea how I got here, and the sunlight that once streamed brightly through the trees, illuminating my way forward, has dimmed to a shadowless blur.
If I had any energy at all, I might cry out or send up a flare through the canopy overhead. But right now I am too tired, too broken down, too mired in discouragement to call for help. I shall wait this out instead and hope that the people who love me -- and there are many -- will still love me when I find my way back.
Tonight, after wringing my soggy self out over the phone with a friend, I wearily picked up Adela from daycare. Sensing my exhaustion she said, "Let's play the quiet game, mom." And so we did. All the way home.
~ Katie
Woodswoman, Anne LaBastille, 1976, page 276
