Skilled in surviving social distancing

Keeping others at a distance to save my life isn’t a new concept for me, though the context is different. Pandemic versus my psychotic mother. But my emotions inside have trouble distinguishing the two situations.

Mom always said, “it’s like this in everyone’s home behind closed doors.” And I believed her until I was 16. She would say that to me in the throes of her psychosis but also when she was calm, during our ‘debriefings’ when she tried to teach me how she was working on changing so that she wouldn’t get so angry anymore. She would read to me from her self-help books, from her Overeaters Anonymous books, from Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child and Prisoners of Childhood. That’s a lot for a child to take in. Although I believed her, part of me wanted to call bullshit. The night before, she was yelling that she wanted me dead and chased me with a knife. And now we were sitting on the couch and she was educating me on personal growth. Even then, it didn’t really make sense. But, during debriefings (the term I use now, I had no idea what was going on at the time), my job was just to listen, let her hold me, cry, and tell her she was forgiven and that I loved her. She would tell me about her childhood and how her father would beat her mom and the kids, how they lived in terror, and how it was like that in everyone’s homes. And the most important thing was silence. Never tell anyone.

The image that keeps coming back during COVID19 is the view of the window in my childhood bedroom. Sometimes the image is from my own perspective and sometimes I am watching myself look out the window. There were several windows in my room but I would only sit at this one. This window was next to my bed and offered some shelter — it would slow my mom down if she came lunging at me. It was also the window that faced out onto the driveway. My house was up a long driveway with one other house — set far back from the street. But from this window, I could see that house and two others. I could see into my neighbor’s kitchen. When I looked out this window, I would see other people, I could almost see behind closed doors. I would look, desperate to see the same things that were happening in my house. But I never saw it. I saw people washing dishes, playing with the dog in the backyard, and sitting down for a family dinner. They probably pulled the blinds when they were trying to kill each other, my childhood mind reasoned. I also searched out the window for someone to save me, to rescue me from my mom who wanted me to die. After my mom would scare me to my core, I would look out the window and tears would streak my cheeks. After she set up the hose in the car in the garage for us to go to sleep together because that was the best thing for us, I sat in my bedroom with the lights off and looked out the window, searching for someone to rescue me. I sent out cries for help in my mind, but no one came. Other times, I knew no one was coming and I learned what despair feels like. People were so close but no one was ever going to come. I was completely alone. In those moments, I knew my mother didn’t love me and wanted me dead. And not a single soul outside my house knew or cared that my mother might kill me — cared enough to face her to save me. I was trapped, terrified, and cut off from the outside world. When my mom was like that, I couldn’t go downstairs to get food. Completely cut off from things that nourish us.

Movies that have frightened me the most are ones that re-enact this psychological experience. The scene in Gravity where Sandra Bullock detaches George Clooney and he floats away to certain death in outer space, but the two of them can talk through their microphones. They are connected but she cannot save him. He can see her, but knows there is no help coming. Capital punishment and execution elicits something similar in me because it is a situation where people are standing by and won’t help, they actually kill someone. There is no hope and no help, but people are right there.

When I got sick the other week and there was no one to help me, these memories got stirred up. And now, when people have to be six feet away and I live alone, these memories stay right below the surface. I know that I am low on the priority list of all my friends and I’m not even on the list with my family. No matter how much my friends love me, I am not someone they would break quarantine for, and they shouldn’t. If I am sick, no one is coming. This is what my mom told me would happen and it was one of the reasons she gave for our suicide. She told me that no one would ever love me, choose me as their number one, and that I would always be alone. The pain of that life would be unbearable and the best thing for both of us would be to die together. Part of me knows that she wasn’t actually able to predict the future, and that the situation I am in now isn’t really her prophecy coming true, but part of me isn’t so sure. In a sense, I am very alone. There are people who care about me and who will talk to me on the phone, and even tell me that I am not alone, but those people are frightened of my situation. They don’t want to imagine what it is like to be so cut off from human beings that it is dangerous. It is easier for them to say, “oh you’re not alone, stop being so dramatic, I’m here for you,” than it is to sit with the painful truth that they can’t or won’t be there with me and that they could be in similar situation sometime. To even acknowledge that experience of isolation is too frightening for most people. And not being understood deepens the isolation. Being told my reality isn’t accurate deepens the isolation.

I remind myself now that I am an adult, a strong, resilient woman with a store of ‘sisu’ for times like these. I am not a helpless child. In fact, I am someone with lots of practice in social distancing and isolation. I am skilled at surviving this form of emotional anguish. In some ways, I am more emotionally prepared for this insane time we find ourselves in during a global pandemic. I know how to hide behind closed doors. I know how to survive when no one is coming. I am strong and I can take care of myself. And as this time of social distancing brings these emotions up to the surface, I am also forced to do the hard work of grieving. Grieving that my childhood prepared me for this. And I find myself sitting with the fact that my mother’s prediction for me may come true. I may live my life without knowing what deep emotional and physical intimacy feels like, what it is like to fall in love and to share your life with another person. I may be on my own. The trick is to focus on my strength, on the fact that I can find beauty and meaning elsewhere. But even here, with this experience, I am alone. If I share this experience with someone, they will tell me about how I can’t predict the future and they will share an anecdote about a friend who got married at 60. No one is comfortable with my experience. They find it so repulsive they can’t even sit with me through it. I know it is possible that I could find a partner later in life. But it is also possible that I may not. And I have to find a way to be comfortable in my life as it is now. If I only focus on how my life might change, that leaves in a place where I tell myself that my life as it is must be unacceptable. I need to be at peace with how things are and curious about what the future might hold.

No one wants to time travel with me to my childhood bedroom where my mom was concocting a plan to kill me. And so no one is willing to sit with my experience now. Childhood trauma stays with us. It is very hard to connect deeply with another person when you have been so deeply wounded — literally left to die at the hands of your mother. So, I am strong enough to survive months of social distancing and self-quarantine, but those survival skills come at a heavy price. I am alone when we aren’t social distancing too.

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