Reading The Merry Recluse, the last essay in the book by the same name. She describes the moment that this phrase arrived in her mind, and how it freed her from the mindset that had trapped her before in the unflattering, often unsympathetic perceptions of others about singlehood.
Re-framing. How does one do it? I feel as if this is exactly what I seek - the right phrase, the right angle from which to view my life, my circumstances, my story, so that I can tell it in a way that is pleasing to me. To hell with what everyone, anyone, else may think. Who knows what they think, anyway? Most people don't know their own thoughts much of the time, as near as I can tell. Thoughts are like the weather - the zen concept of monkey-mind, that running, endless, often meaningless commentary that's like tuning in to Stream of Consciousness Radio, 98.wacky on your dial.
Like all things, I think it just happens when the moment is right - the seed is planted, you've watered it well. But you just have to wait - there's no forcing the sun to come out, to warm the soil to just the right temperature for the right number of days for your little seedling to pop out of its safe cocoon of dirt. It'll happen when it's ready.
***
Reading further, she captures almost perfectly the ambiguous feelings of being single, caught between enjoyment of one's 'freedom' and envying couples and families:
Why don't I want that? That's what comes up. Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?I think it's what she describes in a previous essay, Time Alone:
Isolation - the impulse to isolate - is about fear and self-protection; it's about creating a cocoon, a place so seductively comfortable it becomes difficult to leave. It is not, strictly speaking, about solitude, although access to solitary time certainly comes in handy. But I can be isolated - can feel isolated - in a roomful of 25 people, at a party, in the middle of a week that's peppered with social obligations. The sensation has to do with flight, with distance, with a compulsion to erect barriers and hide behind them, lest others see how fearful I am beneath the surface, or how troubled. Get me out of here. That's the feeling. I am uncomfortable. I need to be alone.She captures, for me, the essence of what it is to be terrified of other people. There's this mystery, some secret that everyone else seems to know but somehow you've never acquired the knack for: being at ease around others.
[...]
That's the difference between solitude and isolation: solitude is calm and serene, isolation is fearful; you bask in the one, wallow in the other.
[...]
...how quickly solitude can turn to isolation, how quickly that soothing sense of self-sufficiency can be replaced by the sense of estrangement, and how difficult it is to get back into the world once you've stepped away from it, as though you've entered some alien obit and can't quite propel yourself back into the normal, human one. Solitude is about cultivating peace and quiet; isolation is about yielding to fear, and the more you yield to fear, the tighter its grip on you becomes. Spend too much time without people and the simplest social activities - meeting someone for coffee, going out to dinner - begin to seem monumental and scary and exhausting, the interpersonal equivalent of trying to swim to France.
Knapp doesn't seem to have the tendency toward self-examination that I seem to have developed (maybe from reading too much 'self help' stuff) - she seems, more often than not, to simply tell her stories as if she were slightly detached, observing herself from a distance.
Maybe this is what writers do? Or maybe, even, is why they write? They can't speak of what they 'see' in real life, it'd be too strange, too odd, too awkward. Since there's no one to speak to about it, no one who seems to share that exact experience (or who's willing to admit it), they have to let it out via the relative anonymity of print. The word 'confessional' comes to mind, (which, I realize, is not an original idea). A way of purging all the bottled-up feelings, longings, desires, frustrations of a lifetime. A way to let it all out, but at a safe distance from whoever might receive this message in a bottle. Thus is the socially awkward, shy, introverted recluse converted into a powerful voice who can speak for all the others out there who are unable to find such an outlet. Her voice channels the longings of all those who, like her, wish they could break out of the cage of fear and shame.
Which is why 'merry recluse' is so powerful, at least potentially: It reframes her story from sad, shy spinster to a woman of life and letters who chooses this path for herself after careful consideration of her options.
Of course, once again, I'm reminded of fundamental misattribution error, the human penchant for explaining things in the ways that are most convenient to maintaining our self image or view of the way things should be. A bit of rationalization is always handy for taking the edge off of too much raw, undiluted truth.
Unfortunately I don't think it worked for Knapp any better than it works for most of us - the need for real, genuine, fulfilling human connection cannot be assuaged by any amount of mental contortionism. The reality is, we simply need other people. Whether we're able to actually get said needs met is another question altogether.
But I think it gave her peace, at least temporarily. As one who has spent much of my life agonizing over where I went wrong, starting long before I'd really had a chance to actually make many mistakes of such life-changing direness*, I'm glad she was able to find some respite from the pain of feeling like an outsider, if only for a moment. That she was able to find some joy, even a kind of grace, in being exactly who she was. And that her 'moment' is captured in print allows the rest of us to see where she went, and feel a little less alone in our own struggles. As a fellow recluse, I am grateful to her for leaving her story behind for all to see.
And I'm under no illusion that she did it for me, or you, or any other reader - she did it for herself, as we all do: the hope that somewhere, sometime, someone will see who she is (or was, she died in 2002) will vindicate all that pain, all that suffering. That it will not have been for naught :-) She did not go quietly.
***
I feel as if Caroline Knapp sacrificed herself, in a way; she died of cancer, which to me is the demise of ultimate self-sacrifice - being eaten alive by all the buried angers and resentments of a lifetime. (My father died of cancer, and I still think it was because he always pretended to be 'fine', no matter what. Put on the happy face. He had hundreds of people at his memorial service, which I know I never will: Because I'm not nice. Or, at least, I'm trying to no longer be 'nice' in the ways that are damaging to my physical and mental health. I've had plenty of people say I'm a 'nice' person in ways that caught me off guard, given that I grew up feeling like there was something fundamentally, basically wrong with me.)
Not to accuse her for her own death; however, I do believe that by swallowing the poison of being 'good', one result is that we die a slow, painful death of being silenced by our goodness.
I have never really wanted to be 'good'; I chose it as the lesser of the weevils (once again).
Now I'm trying to break out of the trap. Easier said than done. Dad lived to be 48; I'm 46. We'll see how far I get. Grandfather managed to live to be 90-something in spite of what appeared to be a lifetime of depression masquerading as taciturnity. Maybe living out in the country was part of it? Who knows. Dad's side of the family (except for dad) seem to be of fairly hardy stock. It's a liability in some ways - no matter how sick you are, you still look frickin' healthy as a horse.
*As evidence I offer this 'poem' from a pain-filled teenage night in a college dorm room, feeling alone, terrified of the loneliness, seeing my life stretching ahead as a desert from which I would never escape:
bitterness, pain, tears - self-pity for a life wasted
carelessly spent, irreplaceable, unredeemable
null and void
a cancelled check.
once begun with clean, pure slate
opportunity, limitless; capabilities, unbounded;
slowly dribbles away, like an hourglass' sand
till naught remains but dust.
a faint powder, mere residue
marks the passage of a soul
scarcely noticed, the remains soon forgotten
scattered far and wide by the winds of time.
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