Unfrozen

If Paul Simon’s "I Am a Rock” were a picture, I’d be it.

A winter day, gray and raw, the kind of cold you feel right through the window. I am staring out my window at a blanket of snow. 

But, it's not the weather that keeps me inside. It's not even the pandemic. It’s not even agoraphobia. It's not the world I want to avoid, just people.

I’m not antisocial. More asocial. People just aren’t my thing. Books, the piano, cooking, the New York Times crossword, I could spend hours with those. But people? A few minutes among people and I’m exhausted.

We outgrow many things we enjoyed as children; sugary cereals, canned pastas. Me, I outgrew liking people.

Like most children, I played outside with the neighborhood kids. I played atop head-high mounds of snow left by plows, claiming my title of King of the Mountain, before tumbling down, landing softly, but wetly, on the dirtied slush at the bottom. 

The biggest danger plaguing my young world was the towering spruce tree in the corner of my parents’ yard. Standing over 18 feet tall, it dwarfed everything: our house, the electric wires, and me, and it was just begging to be climbed, especially when the girl across the street, Jennifer, dared me to climb it. Jennifer was everything I was not: tall, athletic, daring, pretty! When she said “climb”, I asked, “how high?” I climbed as high as I could, moving from the thick, sturdy limbs at the tree’s base, to the sparser, thinner ones higher up. I wanted to be King of the Mountain! But Newton had other ideas (what comes up must come down), and as my mother later put it, I “fell and went boom!” This would not be the last time I went out on a limb to impress a girl, and it would not be the last time I fell far and hard as a result.

Even before that, though, I was not very good at socializing. I actually remember my first day of nursery school. I was wearing what I was sure was the world’s thickest eyeglasses, and the kids picked on me. I hid. I cried. I vomited, all over my overalls. (What goes down must come up). Because that’s how to win friends and influence children: projectile vomit. I was officially and forever (at least to the nursery school kids) christened “ewwww! Gross!” The teacher called my mother to pick me up. I begged my mother not to send me back. 

I did go back, of course, and learned to make do keeping to myself. I spent playtime in the corner, plucking out melodies on a tiny 12-key piano or the xylophone, which, missing its hammer, could only be played using the edges of wooden building blocks. The nice thing about a piano or xylophone is that you can be an orchestra of one: On piano, me! Accompanied on xylophone (and poorly, though softly-sung solos), by…me! My band of one did not help me make friends, but it did keep my feelings, and my breakfast, safely on the inside. 

In later school years, I kept a safe distance from my peers. I’d finish my test early, then lift my head and watch the students around me as the worked. It was the only time it was safe for me to observe them; when they are too lost in their tests to notice me noticing. I felt like those nature specials, where the scientist watches the wildlife from afar, observing the social habits of a foreign species from the safety of his plastic windscreen.

 But keeping my distance only worked for so long. In high school, college, and law school, people sought me out, usually for studying help. I tried to turn those interactions into friendships, even (dare I hope!) relationships, but it felt like I spoke a different language, especially when it came to romance. Years of rejections broken only by the occasional ill-fated relationship. They usually lasted only 2 months before my partner would bolt. I plunged into a deepening depression.

One day, something broke, like a dam giving way. All the stress and sadness I’d carried around pushed against some barrier and broke through with a crash I could almost hear. I began to tremble, then began to cry, then I could not stop the tears. I was in law school at the time. I stood in the center of the library, crying uncontrollably. Alarmed students called the librarian, who called the school counselor. Before I knew what was happening, I’d been walked outside to a waiting ambulance.

There was a time I could have avoided the hospital; I could have said, “I’m fine now, I just needed a moment”, and refused to step into the ambulance. But part of me did not want to. Part of me wanted a break in the battle, to leave myself to another’s care. So, I climbed in to the ambulance, and stepped out into another world.

The hospital was frightening. I entered the psychiatric ward through a heavy, electronically locking door, like something you’d see in a prison movie. Two large orderlies stood sentry, one to each side of the door, managing to look menacing despite their baby-blue scrubs.

While the ward locked tight, the doors to the patients’ rooms did not lock, not even the bathroom doors. Privacy was a luxury of the healthy.

It was like some dystopian human zoo: wide open doors giving views of schizophrenics, catatonics, and all manner of people in pain. Standing at the threshold, I could not help but wonder, was this me? Did the treatments help? Did the medications help? How long had they been here? Was it by choice, or were they captive? Each face I saw looked so lost and alone, glazed eyes searching for something they might never find.

For the first two days, I would not leave my room other than for sessions. It terrified me what I would found outside my door. Eventually, I was forced out: it turned out that the rooms did lock, but only from the outside. I returned from session on my second morning to find the door to my room locked. The nurse explained that the patients were encouraged to socialize with each other, to break out of their comfort of isolation.

I ventured only as far as the rec room, and rather than cards, games or anything else that required interaction, I played piano. I played Beethoven, Elton John, and The Who’s Tommy. I played my emotions. From the anger and pain of Beethoven’s sonatas, to the frenetic energy of The Who’s Tommy. I played my emotions through to the peace of Bach.

As I played, patients approached me, and, in the classic “what are you in for”, asked me my story, and told me theirs.

It was in this way that the hospital helped me realize something: pain is like matter; it can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only be moved about, its weight or bearer shifted. This seemed the key to healing. There is something admirable in strength and independence, but there is no converse shame in turning to others. It is the very human desire to not feel alone. It’s Tommy’s plaintive plea, See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.

They released me from the hospital after two weeks. Apparently, the key to freedom was not telling the doctors I felt better, or taking the antidepressant they prescribed, but eating my entire lunch. Hospital food. It’s as if they thought “well, if he’s willing to eat that, he must want to live.”

That was six months ago. Shortly after I got out of the hospital, the pandemic made life computer-based. I told myself it was fate’s way of saying “well, you tried, but people are better at a distance.” Now stay-at-home orders are lifted, people are venturing out again, even in this frigid snow. There is a depression support group holding a session a few minutes from home. I should go, I will go, not for myself, but for someone else that may need an ear.  

I also read of a cooking class behind held in town, a ‘welcome back to indoor dining’, six feet apart, of course. Six feet, I can do. 

I open the door, and step out into the frigid air, feeling warmer than I have in years.