Less alone is better

On hiding inside myself

Inward, inward, inward. I’ve been turning inward, because outward is so hard.

I don’t even want to write an essay for this month. It’s forcing me to let some of that inward out, and to recognize it. Here goes anyway.

There’s a part of me that’s skilled at disassociation. Disassociation is when you tune out of the world around you, and focus on something else, or perhaps just feel blank. It can be a mental health coping mechanism that might mean you retain no memories of something happening, or it can be when you go into autopilot to drive or walk home and don’t really remember all of the decisions you had to make to get there.

I am so skilled at disassociation, that I used to not even notice it. It would happen to me. Disassociation was a fuzziness that kept me from processing what was going on, and that some other part of me had learned to seem like—talk like—I knew what I was doing and saying and hearing.

Lately, I’ve been using a different flavor of disassociation. Video games, books, TV. These are disassociation because you are drawn into a world that isn’t the world around you. You escape into a different reality. For this flavor, these past few weeks, I know what I’m doing. I know that I’m choosing to distract myself from the pain and uncertainty I’ve been feeling. And when I’m connected to these media distractions, I forget that pain.

But then, when I come out of that alternate world, everything can rush to the surface. I cry or I tense all my muscles or I freeze, gazing into space. Sometimes it’s all three. By choosing disassociation, I’m preventing myself from processing the emotions I’m experiencing.

I’ve been like this before, and eventually I come out of it. I’m at the point now where I’m canceling and avoiding as many commitments as possible. Knowing that there’s nothing coming up helps me feel less pressure to hide from overwhelming emotions—and it’s been key to helping me escape theses time of ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hide me.

Maybe you experience things like this, too? You’re not alone. I got to talk to a friend the other day about how we’re doing, and I said toward the end of our conversation, “I feel less alone, but I’m not sure I feel better.” She replied, “Yeah, but less alone is better.” I laughed and said, “You’re right.”

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Mentioned in this issue: This month’s photo captures a double sunflower head, back to back on the same stem. The phenomenon that causes this formation is called fasciation. It can be a standard part of a plant’s growth, or in the case of this particular sunflower, an accident of its biology.