I Find Solitude To Be the Best

I find solitude to be the best.

I remember as a teen heading into the movie theater alone or grabbing some take-out to eat in the car.

Taking my car to the do-it-yourself car wash and laughing at myself as I raced to finish before the buzzer ended with a car full of suds.

Heading to my job and becoming an independent woman. Learning as I went. Not much guidance at home.

I learned the hard way. I struggled to listen to motherly advice from someone who struggled to pull her life together, but I look back now and it seems like a blink of an eye that the years have passed me by.

From 21 to 45 I’ve spent hours and hours around tables looking for suggestions on how to get my life together. I’ve stayed abstinent from the relentless pull of being high or intoxicated. I’ve tried to live a better life, to break this cycle.

I’ve birthed a son who, in his 22 years has yet to see his mother under the influence.

I looked in the faces of these women looking for a mother. I’ve sat around this table still empty and alone after all of these years, knowing the drugs and alcohol took my mother and finding no replacement.

Seeing my life now with my family and feeling like it’s too much to be me sometimes. Why do I have to be so needy? So sad all of the time? Can I unburrow all of the dark and create light?

Can I finally be healed once and for all? Will I reach the core of this onion?

My brain is tired. I seek relief but find no peace until I am alone with my creator.

I replay the moments of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and Wellbutrin and wonder if I should just concede. I’ve tried as hard as I could to do it on my own with only glimmers of happiness and peace.

As a young girl, I struggled to show up. I struggled to be around others. I hid and felt different. I was different. I am different.

Can I finally accept myself for being different in this copy-cat world? Can I finally understand that my brain works differently and it’s okay to be sad sometimes, it’s how we process and stop dissociating from our lives? We are present and it hurts.

I’ve been through all of this before, the puberty and the sass talking. I feel old and worn. Can I do this all over again?

Can I find joy and contentment through any of it? Can I learn to trust without watching my back too afraid to stop seeking control in every situation?

It reminds me of this Mary Oliver poem that I will leave in conclusion:

“Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing

to be dazzled—

to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—

that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum

of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

― Mary Oliver, House of Light