Loneliness

Loneliness is not being seen as we are.
Not being accepted for who we are.

Loneliness also gets created when we feel forced to hide who we are.

Art is about learning to express the full range of who we are.
And - learning to withstand that not everyone will understand or approve.

In that way, Art is about learning to know ourselves.
To approve of ourselves.
To come home to ourselves. 

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi everyone. Uh , welcome back. Uh, <laugh>. If you're watching, you know why I'm laughing because this feels like an incredibly ill advised way to set up a podcast. Um, there's a heat wave in upstate New York and actually probably a lot of the country right now in early September. And I am in a place with no air conditioning and it is so bloody hot that I cannot, I think I would melt if I more than melt. I would probably pass out if I turned on a light kit and lock myself indoors. So I'm outdoors , um, where it's stunningly beautiful. And also I am very afraid of how loud these crickets are, or cicadas. Um, the birds troll every once in a while and it's super peaceful, but , um, I'm a little worried The mic is picking all of it up. And I'm also a little bit close to a road that's a bit Maine. So , um, you'll hear trucks and hopefully I'll be louder than all of that , um, because I'm having a week and I'm just going for it. So here I am going for it outdoors. Um, whew . I'm always like, how do I talk about stuff without going into medical , uh, life that has been happening. I was here two weeks ago with a sling on, the sling is off, which is exciting. Uh, the pain remains a mystery and , uh, we don't know what's going on, which is par for the course. I feel like I'm just starting to say it's very on brand for me to have mystery ailments that hurt a lot and nobody can diagnose. Um, and I was thinking about you guys because I had a follow-up , uh, appointment with my doctor who has , um, scheduled me for an m r I , so we'll have more answers hopefully at some point in my life. And I was really dreading it because in my long, long journey of going to doctors , uh, with ailments that they do not understand and cannot diagnose , um, I, it's very different now. I have to say the caveat is very different now than it was 20 years ago when this started, where I often met up with doctors who said, your blood labs are fine, your test results are fine. There's nothing wrong. And I was left with a lot of pain and no answers. And I really remember getting this implicit message of we don't know what's wrong. So it's you. Um, and you know, there's been a lot, a lot of , um, talk, which I'm really grateful for about medical gaslighting and it's become really an acknowledgement that, and I know this is a fine line for doctors because they are meant to be authoritative and maybe that's how they're trained to be and they are meant to be reassuring in their source of knowledge. But what's missing is, instead of saying the tests that we know how to run, cannot figure out what is causing you pain. And so we need to find somewhere else to go. They kind of just say nothing is wrong, which is not actually what's happening. And the amount that we know about the body and how it heals and how it breaks is infinitesimal compared to what we don't know. There's so much about all of this that we don't know. And so , um, if you're someone like me who has a lot of things that are weird going wrong, it feels incredibly lonely to go to experts who you are hoping provide the answer to your pain and also to your sense of brokenness and have them sort of look at you like, well , we dunno what you're talking about. Willis , um, nineties reference for all you old folks with me. Um, and, and I was thinking about this idea of loneliness of I, I literally was preparing for this follow-up appointment to make my case with my doctor, to get him to authorize an M R I . And actually now I know that he has to go and fight with the insurance company and prove that I'm worthy of an M R I because I opted outta physical therapy. 'cause when I went to physical therapy, everything was worse. And insurance companies want you to do physical therapy before they do an M R I , which I sort of understand. Anyway. My doctor was on my side as my point . Um, he just wasn't excited about the prospect of many, many phone calls to try to get me the , um, diagnosis or the data that I need. And, but I was preparing for this meeting because, you know, the first time I saw him he did an x-ray and he was like, great, your bones are good. You are , um, there's no dislocation. You're fine. Stop wearing the sling 'cause you'll get frozen shoulder. You really wanna like start moving your arm so it doesn't freeze in that way , um, of kind of being hung by your side. And I did. And then he sent me to physical therapy and I did that. And then everything got worse than it had been. And that was really scary 'cause I went to do the , I'm such an A plus student. I'm like, tell me to do a thing. I will go do it. I will go do it. I wanna get the freaking a plus on my test score. And so , um, I did the thing and the thing backfired. And so I felt again like, oh, I don't fit into your system. I don't know how to like, I don't know what's next. 'cause I think you told me to do a thing and then I failed at the thing that you told me to do. And I was thinking about the what loneliness is. And loneliness to me is really defined by not being seen by somebody, by not having them, the ability to see you and not being able to be your true self around people. And that can come in a lot of guises. I know that for a lot of L G B T Q community that can feel like not being able to talk about who you have a crush on because they're maybe not the gender that's approved , um, in the circle that you come from. And it can show up as, you know, being an accountant who loves to sing and doesn't wanna anyone to tell, you know, that like that doesn't fit into this idea of who you are as a serious person. And we're all incredibly multifaceted and we all have lots of weirdness in us. And the weirdness is the best. And I think a form of intimacy is being able to share your inner weird with someone who gets you. And so there's this particular loneliness of going to doctors and explaining that I'm in pain and having them look at me and say, the lab results say nothing is wrong, therefore I don't know what you're talking about. And so I was preparing how to translate the week that I'd had of pain into doctor speak and insurance speak . And I'm learning now that one of those is I missed work. I couldn't go to work. I was in so much pain. And insurance really wants you to be a work person. They don't care so much if it's like you can't play tennis. Um, but if you can't walk to work or you can't perform your work functions, they listen a little bit more because capitalism , uh, and I really couldn't work and I was in a lot of pain. And uh, but, but what I've been learning in this journey with doctors is the ways in which, I mean, if you know me at all, I have data for everything. I track all of my symptoms. I track what I ate before my stomach hurt. I track what medicine I tried and how it made me feel. I'm tracking everything because there's all these things that happen that I can't explain . And so I'm always trying to figure out what I do know , um, so I can figure out what I don't know. And so I always go into a doctor's office and I have all kinds of data and all kinds of information and yet it doesn't quite seem to land. And so it feels like I am speaking clinging on to them. Um, and maybe that would be fine if it was like a cocktail party and I was like, cool, cool. You didn't get my joke. That was, you know, kind of lame, but okay. But when you're really in pain and needing someone to understand you so they can help you , it, it's so desolate, it's so devastatingly lonely to be in an office and try to communicate what is wrong and be met with a blank stare. And this made me think about you guys because always I'm thinking about you guys and the purpose of art and this idea that the purpose of art is to figure out a language to express yourself, to be able to share with the world who you are, to be brave enough to take your weird insides and bring them outside. And you might not share your weird insides with everybody. Um, but I do think it's about that. It's about creating a language that allows us to explain to the world and by the world, it could be our loved ones or it could be a blockbuster movie , um, but who we are and to be seen fully as that person. You know, even actors are always saying, yes, you wanna disappear into someone, but you're actually, if you're doing it right, you're bringing out your truest self and you're overlaying it on a character story. But that's you. 'cause that's what people respond to is who are you really? What is your unfiltered reaction to the world? What is your unfiltered gut punch to being broken up with and having your, you know, going through incredible loss or feeling disappointed or like how do you process the world and how do you connect with people or push them away? And that's everybody's journey. And so I was thinking about how art is essentially built out of this human need to connect and to bridge the gap of loneliness by being seen. And so the gift of someone receiving your novel, your podcast, your performance and recognizing themselves in it means that they feel seen by your art, which is an incredible gift. And when they tell you that they felt seen, you also feel seen. So there's this incredible reciprocity to putting art in the world and having others experience it. I dunno if you've had that . I've had this all the time when I'm reading something really good book and I'm like, wow, they just nailed something that's been bugging me that I could feel inside me, but I couldn't put my finger on. And now like I, I feel seen, I have language for this thing that I've been feeling and I couldn't, I couldn't explain. I didn't have language for, I didn't understand the math of those, you know, relationships or, or whatever. And, and that's art is an act of translation. Art is an act of expression. Art is an act of creating language. Um, and so I just wanted to remind us all that that's kind of the epic thrust of it. And, and that there's this incredible thing where in the search we're trying to express ourselves to others. I think we more and more define ourselves to ourselves. And yes, it's incredibly important to have people receive your work, but mostly because when someone else receives you, it allows you to receive yourself more. And so all these acts of writing, of explaining, of expressing are really ways of coming home to yourself. And what I find is that the more that you practice putting stuff in the world, in whatever small way feels right to you, the more you're able to attract others who look at your stuff and go, oh yeah, I know what that is. I know what that feels like. I'm so glad you said it. And then your circle grows to people who look at you and go, yes, I get you. I see you and I don't want another version of you. Go , I want this version that shows me all that you are. And that's an incredible gift. And it doesn't have to be everyone in your life. There's lots of coworkers and family members who don't necessarily need to know all parts of you. But I think everyone is desperate for a core of those people and most especially for them themselves, to be able to welcome home who they are. And in that way it's a lifelong, it's a lifelong journey, right? 'cause we're always peeling back layers, learning more about ourselves and always grappling. I think with the experience of being human, which constantly changes. We lose people, we lose parents, we lose, you know , um, we grow old, we retire. There's certain milestones that a lot of us share. Certainly aging, if you're lucky enough is one of them. And then there's so many ways to experience those things and the losses and the joys of being human that we're always gonna grapple with what it is to be human. And we're always gonna grapple with explaining to another person, this is what my grief feels like. This is what my disappointment does to me. This is what my joy, my love feels like. And whether you can paint it or turn a phrase or perform it, it's just this deep desire to both know yourself and be seen by others. So In my ever expanding , um, dedication to turning all of my medical journey into reflections on art because I think art is life and so everything is the same journey and also for my own sanity, let's be real. Um, I really was thinking about how the thing that I am missing most is always the thing that I'm struggling with right in front of me. Which is how do I communicate, how do I be seen? How do I interrupt the doctor speak and or meet them on their plane and doctor speak so that they can see me better in the five minutes they have to see me before they have to move on to something else. And it might be in the end that the doctor isn't the person I'm gonna get to see me fully, right? That loneliness may always persist. 'cause again, they got five minutes and they got the insurance breathing down their neck and all these rules for how they can really show up for me despite their best intentions. And I have really lovely doctors. And so that might not be the ones that I get to go to to be seen fully. But I'm really lucky that I have people who see me, who I check in with almost daily. Especially when things are rough with my body and who see the journey and understand. 'cause I've also learned if you try to tell someone it's been 20 years, like no one can grasp that. But anyone who's been with me for the last year or two who's been like, she's in a sling now she's got a stomach ache, this thing is wrong, this thing , like, it's a lot. And it's more for my brain to comprehend. I'm constantly like, no, no, no. That was, we're gonna forget that we're gonna skip that part of the story and get to like the good parts, right? Like it's very hard to comprehend a string of chronic things. Um, and so it's also a hard thing to communicate in five minutes to anyone. And my medical history is fast and convoluted and there's lots of stories and it depends on which body part you wanna know about. So it's also hard for me to download all of my data into anyone in those five, maybe 15 minutes that I get with them. So they might not be the one who gets to see all of me 'cause they don't have that kind of time. But as long as I keep practicing seeing all of me, which is part of showing up here with this sling and now my kinesio tape , I'm probably saying that wrong. Um, that I've learned how to do myself very inexpertly. Um, yeah, I think those are the loud truck. Um, I think those are the gifts of, we have this thing in film, which is We have an expression on set, which is hold for sound. Meaning if someone's motor is very, very loud, everyone just gets quiet and waits until the loud sound goes and then we pick up filming. And so I always think hold for sound. Um, but I just wrap up with this thought that , um, this ongoing journey of my own, of showing up here with my shoulder injury that I keep thinking, oh, tomorrow it'll be better, tomorrow'll be better, right? We're doing the M r i , we're doing the X-ray. I'll go to physical therapy, it'll be okay. And four weeks, five weeks into it, I honestly don't want to know how long it's been. I am very slowly finding a little bit less pain and a little bit more mobility, but have very little answers and am hour by hour figuring out what the hell to do today. And it has been really hard for me to show up for this podcast. 'cause I'm like, what is the point? I don't know if tomorrow will be better. I don't know where I'm headed. I don't know that anyone has answers for me. And so part of my practice of showing up to myself is that hold for sound is that , um, going through a medical journey that's long and labored doesn't erase the parts of me that still have something to say that still wanna perform, that are still writing, that still wanna learn songs that someday hopefully I get to play on my guitar. And until then I'll learn how to sing. And that's hard. You know, it's, I think when I'm sick and I'm hurting, I just wanna be that version and have Netflix and chocolate on the couch all day and not try to be anything else. Um, and there are days when that's what I do. And then there are days like this where I'm gonna just try a little bit more to be more parts of me than just the one and show up in a place where I get to be seen, which is also incredibly hard. So my invitation to you, and it's not an easy one, you know, is , um, to keep practicing what it is that your inner landscape is telling you and how to translate that and express it in the world. Because if I know anything, it's that we need more of that. We need more people sharing how they live and how they perceive their lives and what journeys they're on. Because that's how we connect. That's how we build community, that's how we know each other, and that's how we walk this really hard path together. Thank you for joining me this week. Be well, my friends.