How to feel things (again)

Returning to the senses. Content warning: grief!!!!!!!!!!!!

Amy Weiskopf (1957) Still Life with Cut Squash and Winter Melon. There’s something about this piece — both the violence of the severance and of the violence of the vibrancy — that felt perfect for this essay. Life is brutalism and (unexpected) beauty, baby!

I know it’s odd to start an essay with absolutely no context and a long poem — but I implore you. Take a moment to read this one out loud, and maybe listen to this while you do it:

Suggested song pairing:

Everything is Waiting for You
by David Whyte.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

The Before, and The After

As early as five, I remember listening to Disney film scores on my CD player, rewinding over and over to just repeat and relish the orchestral reprises. In elementary school, I would sneak out of my bed at night to lay on the driveway and stare at the rural Ohioan stars, imagining myself in some fictional sci-fi movie. When my sister went to college I would sit in her room and sing sad songs about missing her out loud. To whom? An irrelevant question. I sang for the bookshelf and the wallpaper; I performed for life itself. I was a poetic child, easily enchanted.

Everyone seems to acknowledge the slow-but-steady erosion of this “aliveness” as you grow older. My particular descent into world-weariness was precipitated by years of caretaking for, then grieving, my dad. On the other side of it — in what my partner and I call “The After” — the simple pleasures of life relished by a younger version of me feel a lifetime away.

He was diagnosed in the fall of 2019. When I got the call, I collapsed in my friend’s bedroom and bought a flight home. I would spend most of Covid and all of summer 2022 at home with him in Michigan. In the end, I watched my dad slip away, slowly, on a hospital bed in our living room. We moved the TV between the couch and the kitchen so he could watch it comfortably; in June we’d started on a season of The Amazing Race together. By the end of the second season, he had stopped eating. I would spend my 26th birthday at his dedication.

2019-2022 to me is a blur of bitterness and gut-wrenching despair. Even to my closest friends, I have not shared much about this time: a gulf of comprehension — due to my withholding, their lack of inquiry — that I still resent, deep down. It was the pandemic: no one was really checking in on anyone anyways. Only my partner really witnessed how far I fell. I resisted almost all social interaction and didn’t leave my house much, lest I be caught in public when a doctor called. It was total consumption by anticipatory grief. For those three years, I could barely plan a meal for the next day. Of all things, movie trailers in particular triggered me — Marvel Man, in theaters Nov 22! — a reminder that time was passing tick! tick! tick! and that I couldn’t know if my father would still be alive then.

He passed on the morning of August 4th, 2022.

In the aftermath, I returned to my life in New York; it passed me as a blur. Everyone around me seemed to drink socially every day, so I did too. I hated Manhattan with a passion and would visibly loosen on the C-train as we crossed into Dumbo. On weekends, I often felt listless. Everything took 45m of various transport to get to, a degree of commitment consistently greater than my enthusiasm for the destination. As a result, I often spent my time wandering aimlessly — not out of gentle curiosity and an admirable dedication to exercise! — but out of a placeless fomo. I didn’t know what to do with myself; desperately hoped something would find me, direct me. I disassociated frequently. I have almost no memories of these long walks.

In the two years since my father’s death, I’ve been on archeological expedition, trying to piece together — straining to remember — who I was in “The Before.” While I don’t entirely remember myself at 22, I do know that today, I am angrier and more distrustful of the world than I was then. I have less faith that good things happen to people: I never believe that there will be a parking spot; that I will get the job; that there will be extra room for me at the party. I like people less; am overwhelmed more often. My nervous system is out of whack, yet I do not know my way out: I cannot recall an alternative, and do not remember how I, Holly, was once at peace with the world.

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Loneliness and Sensory Hygiene

Suggested song pairing:

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

Only upon reading Whyte’s poem did it occur to me that what I’d been experiencing in New York was loneliness.

On the worst days while my father was sick — and in those years of grieving after — I had felt disconnected from the world; a mutual renunciation. Everyone had been a stranger I distrusted; every place a danger except home. I felt like the world would not take care of me because I was no longer of it. I felt ashamed, sheepish. I had denounced it; how was I supposed to return?

This past March, I partook in a shrooms trip in my NYC bedroom — a goodbye ceremony of sorts, set a few weeks before I was to move. As I settled in, I prepared myself for revelations about New York and the years gone by. Instead, I spent six hours grappling with visions of the Universe showing me the sublime: I saw — no, viscerally experienced — the sensations of remarkable sunsets, grass swaying in the wind on an ocean bluff, the tender joy of seeing pure elation upon a baby’s face. I felt, as many people have experienced before, the undeniable current of warmth, coursing through the universe and through me. Everything was love: the universe and I were simpatico, holding each other dearly.

Eventually I was in conversation with this higher power, begging it to show me more: why couldn’t I experience this, this purity of life and love, every day, every moment? The answer — delivered via my subconscious shame or transmuted via a divine source — came back to me swiftly: “TikTok and alcohol.”

Suddenly I understood, more clearly than ever before, that I had not been awake to the world. In New York, I had felt helpless to the sensation of my life passing me by — of not being maximally alive — and of feeling muted, greyscale. It’s no wonder: Every day, I reported to a job I hated, then met friends for Happy Hour to justify it, and ended my days scrolling on TikTok before bed. I lived this on repeat, allowing social media and drinking to supplant my experience of my life. Somewhere in the “After,” I had stopped giving myself oxygen and allowed myself to cruise, bitterly, on the lowest-effort setting — never looking up. I had used these distractions to disassociate and dull a life I was not proud of, making inaccessible the very sublime all around me that might allow things to change.

Whyte’s poem suggests a remedy for my predicament: “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way, puts it another way: “the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”

In other words, to like life again, I’d have to start noticing it.

Recently, I’ve been naming this phenomenon — the capacity to be aware of the world around you and appreciate it — “sensory hygiene.” Improving it is my new goal in life. I’ve made lots of progress since March. Mostly, I put myself in an environment in which paying attention is just easier: San Francisco. Here, I am surrounded by flora and fauna of almost infinite variety. I am blessed with a brilliant view of the sunrise and sunset every day. Getting to my front door from the street involves walking through a garden of roses and other exotic flowers I have never encountered. I recognize the sounds of various birds that have made their homes in the trees outside my window (like a little Anna’s hummingbird that I’ve named Lars, and four pairs of conure parrots that visit us daily.) Going to the beach is at least a 2x a week occasion, where I go just to dig my feet into the sand and admire the ancient V-formations of various seafaring fowl in the sky. I even relish the fog on cold days, love how it intensifies the sharp smell of eucalyptus that wafts towards you in all directions when hiking in the woods. In San Francisco, I smell, see, hear, and feel more, and more intensely. My sensory hygiene* is improving.

(*My personal litmus test: How many times this week did something make me cry with joy? I use this as a proxy for how much of life is “reaching” me. This week: it was a high school marching competition in Golden Gate Park. I teared up seeing the huge smiles on these kids’ faces: the glee and pride as they hit their marks. They serenaded the crowd with a perfect Bruno Mars arrangement!)

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When I was 19, I spent a year in San Francisco. Upon my return to my college campus in Philadelphia, I was asked what the city had been like and why I loved it so much. The explanation I was compelled to give was simple: “I feel less alone there.” Now, 8 years later, I finally understand what I meant: San Francisco had felt like a safer city to me because I had allowed myself to notice it, really see it — the bushes of bounganvillea, the MUNI seats, Coit Tower up close — and become attached, even devoted. Despite knowing almost no one there, it meant that I always felt like I belonged there.

In Radical Acceptance — thank you Megan for the rec! — Tara Brach suggests that when we stop disassociating, “we are free of mental concepts and our senses are awake, the sounds, smells, images and vibrations we experience connect us with all life everywhere. It is not my pain, it is the earth’s pain. It is not my aliveness but simply life… we discover our intrinsic belonging to this world.”

I’m glad to be back in San Francisco. Loving my life is a lifetime endeavor. Here’s to stopping and smelling the roses; crying at drum lines; returning.