On Feeling Isolated

[MakersDozn]

We struggle with isolation on an ongoing basis. Isolating ourselves, then feeling isolated, then isolating ourselves some more. It becomes such a vicious cycle that it doesn't matter which causes which. It hurts either way.

We usually guard fiercely what we disclose about ourselves to outside people. Yet one day at work, perhaps three years ago, we were in a meeting with about 15 or 20 people in our department. For some reason that we don't remember, we said that we felt isolated from other people.

One of the vice presidents, who we liked and respected, then said something like, "Well, you do isolate yourself." We agreed, and we told her so right then and there. Her boss, the senior vice president of the department, clearly felt uncomfortable with the exchange and quickly changed the subject.

Yet it didn't bother us that the VP said what she'd said, or even that she'd said it in front of a group of people. She was right. And we appreciated that somebody "got" what we were going through, even if she didn't have a solution. We were sad when she was let go by the CEO in a re-shuffle the following year, and we told her so.

But getting back to isolating....It really is a vicious cycle. We live with a reality that most everybody on the outside doesn't understand, including self-appointed "experts." We are a "we." We are not an "I" that only *thinks* we're a "we." Our experience as many is our experience, which is just as valid as the information on our birth certificate, or the definitions of self that are infused into the legal system.

So we experience selfhood in a way, though legitimate, is still a way that most people don't understand and often can't even conceive of. We can't be authentic, because being authentic means being who we are, which in turn depends on feeling safe being any or all of us around outside people. But because people don't understand or accept someone being many, we're forced to conform to the only acceptable paradigm, which is being one. Or appearing to be one. Squelching and combining and genericizing ourselves to such a degree that we're even less sure of who we are than we were in the first place.

Is it any wonder that it takes so much time and energy to heal? It reminds us of a "Peanuts" comic strip that we saw many years ago. Charlie Brown and one of his friends were watching Lucy and her younger brother Linus talking to each other. Lucy, who liked to think of herself as someone who was always right, was talking to Linus about various subjects and getting all the facts wrong. Meanwhile, as he watched, Charlie Brown said to his friend, "It's going to take him twelve years to unlearn everything she's been teaching him."

That's what it's like living as many in a world that only understands and accepts living as one. It seems to take a lifetime to undo the damage done to us by other people's inability to understand the truth.

Charity