On Being Alone & Feeling Seen

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My father died in July, 2019. My brother fell into homelessness somewhere around 2009, and my mom passed away in 2008. But this post isn’t about loss or grief. It’s about how every ending is a new beginning, how every goodbye holds within it a hello, and how every cycle we go through propels us onto the next.

A few months after my dad had passed, I had a dream. A young woman, mid-20’s, walked towards me. At first, I could only see the top of her head. As she came up the hill side I stood on top of, I saw two braids fall down her shoulders. Mountains unfolded in the distance behind her and when she reached me, she unfurled her fingers to reveal something precious. Her smile was equal parts joyful and cheeky, peaceful and electric. I peered into her hand and saw a small white birds egg. We looked down on her little treasure together and then looked into one another’s eyes. Her smile widened until the creases on either side of her eyes were so condensed, I wasn’t even sure she could see anymore.

And then I woke up.

I laid in bed for a while, puzzling together the pieces of the dream, hoping to hold onto the infectious joy the young woman had passed onto me. I had been traveling through my days in such a dark cloud that joy felt like a foreign emotion. A single tear trickled down the side of my face and pooled in my ear.

For days afterward, I returned to that dream. “What did it mean?” I’d ask myself. After all, I’ve always been someone who’s wanted to bend things to mean more.

One day, maybe three or four days after the dream, still floating in a cloud of hazy grief, I wandered into a part of the garden I rarely go and something caught my eye. It was small and white and seemed somehow familiar. I stooped down to inspect it and discovered a small white birds egg, perfectly preserved and hallowed out by tiny sugar ants. The hole they had created was no wider than the head of a pin and in peering into the small opening, was completely cleaned out. I put it in the palm of my hand and smiled until the creases on the sides of my eyes condensed and all I could feel was warmth and light.

New beginnings don’t always feel like we imagine they should.

They’re not always fresh starts, full of clarity and calm. Sometimes new beginnings come from turmoil and trauma and sometimes new beginnings come from endings. This is not to say that new beginnings, borne from joy and intention are less worthy than those forged in pain. But often we humans can struggle to see the diamond in the rough, to recognize the clarity and sharpness that comes from the harshness of dirt and rock.

I remember shortly after finding that little white egg in my garden, I wrote a short story. It was raw and painful and elicited a cascade of tears as I clicked away at my keyboard. It was about a woman, mid-40s. She’d lost her way in life and found herself in a most difficult situation. She was scared, confused and profoundly alone.

It was after typing that last end mark and wiping my nose that last time that I realized something powerful. “She doesn’t have to be alone. I don’t have to leave her alone.”

I returned to my keyboard, tissue box in hand, and wrote her a friend, a sister, and many other guardian angels that watched over her, comforted her, and helped her feel seen. I wrote with a ferocity I’d not ever known. Character after character leapt onto the page, each coming to life in an effort to catch this woman mid-fall, as she seemed to be fading from her own story.

I couldn’t change my situation, but I could change hers.

I had to make a lot of difficult decisions while I wrote her story, and at times it was painful to witness. But it was so important not to look away, not to numb myself and let her suffer alone. I had made the decision to be there. I’d chosen not to leave her alone. I knew what it felt like to be scared, confused and isolated.

And I knew the power of feeling seen.

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