Alone

I didn’t want a career as much as I wanted something to do with life that would serve to cure my low self-esteem. That’s the first and only thing you need to know. However, please note that I truly wanted to be cured more than anything else in the world. My flesh, blood, and bones body was nothing more than a covering for that inner lowness. A dull, low, ache. 

(In English I don’t think that’s an official word - lowness - but it says what I’m all about. Sloshing through the days, slogging through the weeks, slipping through the months.)

I thought standing alone, acting oh so autonomous and straight-backed, would help. The career was supposed to provide the place for that standing. The problem was, I hadn’t counted on standing alone against stinging slings and arrows. Those stings came from people I saw every day, my colleagues. Sometimes they were words I heard, but other times they were things said in halls and closets, by faceless voices and phantom minds.

The speakers were so evil I thought they were mere figments of my imagination. It also seemed like the mean went with the territory. Smart people just acted that way. They spoke to kill. PHD? Yes, but for me it was more like PTSD. You really can catch it in high-fallutin’ places. A doctor informed me that was possible. Tears. It seems PTSD has no cure. 

Still, I did it. Kept searching for the way to blast the inner lowness by showing I knew enough to work in that place. I pretended the twisted ones didn’t exist outside their offices. Inside, inside me, I had my personal fight song. Also, although it took me a while to notice, I had music by steel women to take hold of my shoulders, prop me up, slap my face even, all the while showing sad eyes at how much things hurt. How much I hurt from all the aloneness. Maybe you would like some examples of songs that salved the scrapes and fissures, but I can’t bring myself to mention any. 

I thought publications would help. Conference papers, too. Prove it to myself, because I certainly didn't think much of what I did. Clearly everybody else was better, or at least ninety per cent of everybody else was better. At least I tried hard. (This low self-esteem thing is a messy bird. It squawks and flaps, makes you look awkward. You are.) The result was an annual report and a growing list of accomplishments. Words on paper or a computer. 

I thought nights alone with a good book or a paper to write would help. They were nights that were very alone. Achingly alone. Aching. That means, of course, that the inner coils just stretched and twirled more tightly. 

This is no lie. This is no exaggeration. I might have had a decent brain, but I was also a sick woman.

Then, after a few years of not moving an inch toward the cure that was the reason for the career in the first place, I thought working eighty hours a week would be the be-all and the end-all for the esteem ‘glitch’ in my life. A career was necessary. That was what mattered. No sacrifice was too great. Quitting not allowed. Spend your life workin’ for the man. He doesn’t know or care who you are. 

It’s important to explain that another effect of this feeling unworthy was that I always felt like a fake. Certainly I didn’t deserve the degrees that had been earned during years of study. Nor did I deserve those publications, those conference papers that had my name inscribed beneath their titles. True, I may have deserved the bullying. I was rough, scuffed-up on the outside, not a smooth colleague whose parents had both attended Ivy League schools. Mine never saw the high school graduation ceremony. Sixteen and out.

Definitely I didn’t deserve the partner I had somehow acquired. Class difference, it turns out, can be even greater than race in some cases. Class similarity can mean solidarity. The other way around, upper vs. lower economic level, meant that working class me deserved the criticism I received for not being a good housekeeper, perfectly neat, even-tempered. I grew up damaged goods. A damaged girl.

Admittedly, I was not easy to get along with. That was natural, because my brain never turned off, thinking about the next article that needed to be written, overwriting the esteem that wasn’t there. I didn’t really know how to talk about anything else besides what the career was about. I thought, imagined, supposed he was also passionate about the same thing. He was probably bored to tears, but was too polite to say anything.

There is something else to consider: I had been an only child, used to amusing myself because there were no siblings to play with. Time had to be occupied somehow. My young girl’s technique was to go deep inside my imagination and find a meadow for dancing. I already knew that I only deserved myself, not company. Solitude was my destiny.

He was nevertheless my passion, even though my passion for finding a cure for no self worth was much greater, apparently. I thought he was handsome, exotic, and excessively intelligent. Was he all that? Maybe, but you’ll need to ask somebody else about that now. I don’t have any recent data.

I didn’t know all that much about him. I simply tried to be the right one, be good enough for him. The important thing is that I was able and willing to be alone, which gave him a lot of leeway as well. Of course that was all right and good. He deserved to have his solitude. I shouldn’t be getting in his way. I just thought it was a good combination, the two of us. We gave each other space. I had grown up with it while he had been one of four and had a right to his space now that he was an adult. It was essential to give him what he wanted and needed.

The years went by.

Now we have reached the conclusion: He didn’t need me much, so when we were apart, tending to our careers (more something I did than he did), my absence would do no harm. I thought this because I wasn’t worth being with, as has already been noted.

It had been quite hard to settle into a pattern that fit, not too tight and not too loose. Our life together. A relationship so tenuous yet surviving. Weeks alone, weeks together. It was all I deserved. 

Lots of space for me and the career meant, not to be rich or famous, but to console me for what I could never be: worthy. Long-distance commuting, from one continent to another: it was my protective mantle and my distracting mantra.

I know some people thought otherwise, thought I was not working enough at fighting off the debilitating, tongue-tying low self esteem. Others simply thought I lived a very odd life. They didn’t know me. Nobody saw the working class kid in a ramshackle house on an unsophisticated street in town. Nobody knew I had a different sort of wealth. I didn’t know it myself for a long time. Did I say I was kind of the monastic sort? Hiding away means hiding from some/thing/body. 

Why was I hiding? Some days brought clarity. Others just fogginess and no horizon.

As for the mantle or mantra, there were other examples of people who paid high prices to make life work.

Once somebody told me a story about a couple who were happily married but dirt poor. The husband emigrated for a number of years. They had one child, a boy. I don’t know if the man ever returned for visits during all the years he worked on the other side of the ocean. The sacrifice paid off, though, because he sent money home, they had a roof over their heads and food on the table. Soon after he returned, he had a heart attack and died. His wife went from being a widow of the living to a widow of the dead. Her husband had come back to her, though. He had come back. He didn’t survive the reunion very long, but at least he came back.

So, yes, I do know that lots of people make sacrifices all the time, and often they are ones they never set out to make. Ones they would be incapable of making if they were asked to make them. The thing is, I worked really, really hard at making my sacrifice work. I knew it was necessary if I were to someday, somehow, be worthy of him. Be as smart as he was. He was destined to be the great scholar. I could work to be half as good, perhaps.

And so I stood alone. Again and again. Over and over. Feeling at times like Saint Sebastian. Wasn’t he the one who had tons of arrows shot into his body but he didn’t falter? Sorry, I don’t know a whole lot about saints. It’s not my field of specialization.

I slept alone. You can get a cat or a dog but it’s not the same. It’s nice when the other body in the bed is human sometimes.

I ate alone. This was the really problematic part. You see, I love to cook and am not bad at it, but never bother if it’s only me. Just some cheese and crackers, some olives on the side, maybe a glass of white wine. Great supper for a loner. Add some grapes or clementines to round it out. You could even avoid dirtying a plate; just put a paper towel in front of you.

I worked and wrote alone. Well, not completely, because when you have students you are with them during the class. But you don’t usually socialize with them. That’s even a bit risky. All the class planning and homework correcting, that happened with nobody else around. Writing has to be solitary as well. You might go to a café or a terraza, and there will be people around, but if you want to get anything written, you can’t be gabbing. By noting this, I am admitting that I chose this type of career. I am to blame. Yet probably I chose what I deserved.

I would read poem after poem, novel after novel, review after review. My life, a book, an open book. Only in one sense, though. The rest, the part not made of words and pages, was permanently sealed. We will go no farther on this topic, thank you.

Yes, I knew I had the gift (not talent, by ‘gift’ I mean good fortune) of being able to have my eyes walk onto a page and become disembodied. I think you could call it that. I was on the page, in the book, and I wasn’t me but instead was the reader of another’s words. I was a ghost flitting about the characters on the pages.this might help explain why a career that required constant reading and writing was the only one that would chase out the low. Words, the strongest drug on the market.

A sad poem didn’t speak for me, no. Instead, it led me to the source of the words and that was when I could cry freely, knowing the sadness was for somebody else. I could not be sad because I had made the choice to have a career. That was my story and I was sticking to it. I am sticking to it, despite the fact that this is all very convoluted at this point.

I sincerely apologize.

During all the things I’m describing to you here, I always had my low self-esteem for company. It was the person I saw in the mirror (poor, homely low self-esteem). It was the passenger who told me how to improve my driving. It was company on the couch reading.

We - low self-esteem and I - used to hold conversations sometimes. I never told it to go away, because the long-distance thing I had counterbalanced that. I felt wanted, loved, at least a little bit. That’s what I told myself. It was like clinging to a leaky raft, but who knew?

 When there was nobody other than my faithful low self-esteem around, there was nobody to compare myself to. There was just a void. Void equals emptiness. In this case, it was a good thing. The fact was, when I had nobody around I just felt normal. A lonely normal, but still...

After a few years, I began to think I was a rock, that the sacrifice was cool, that I was brave for managing career and couple roles so successfully. With lots of space.

Then it was over. Gradually, things became raspier, splintier, chillier. Lots of subtle scowls. It was probably his plan so I wouldn’t notice. Or maybe low self-esteem (already identified as my company on lonely nights and weekends) blinded me. Perhaps I am on the spectrum, as they say. It wouldn’t surprise me. 

Career, planned and achieved, had won. Score one point for the Lady. Score none for Self Esteem. Drowning in words, devouring words, words even in bed and in the shower. This was supposed to be divine. Except that obsession with it became an either/or. Cure it or give up, surrender.

Relationship, rather like the emigration story mentioned earlier, had lost. Take that point away from the lady. She lost. He, on the other hand, had gained another partner. The Lady stuck, wait, I stuck, with the aloneness.

Yes, the lady - I - lost him, but at least I had consistently kept the career light burning. Sounds corny, true, and it’s kind of like the Motel 6 ad. We’ll leave the light on for yuh. (Actually, I like that ad. It hasn’t aged well, but it gives you a warm feeling when you hear it.)

Too bad the lady couldn’t lose the low self esteem. Too bad the lady was me. If she hadn’t been battling low self-esteem, she wouldn’t have focused all her passion on the career. She would still have another person in her life. A person with words to speak. I do love words. 

This story ends with no resolution. The end had been determined before it began. The obsession won; love lost. There is still no explanation for the lack of self-esteem that caused my whole muck-up. Not even a tiny theory has been proven as to where it came from and why it coiled itself around my innards so tightly. It might be better not to know. After all, the low self-esteem has done irreparable damage already. Knowing its origin, which I don’t, could finish me off. Some things do not need speaking.

In other words, and mark my words, I will take the reason for this disease I have (for it truly is a disease) to my grave. If the truth decides to come out then, more power to it. I’ve done my part by living the life of a clam (even when trying not to). I’m tired. Very tired. And so alone.

Please, leave me alone or lie down beside me. Your choice. 

I’ll give you all the space in the world.