On Loneliness (‘Tá mé liom féin’: I am with myself (and Durga))

Durga: 36 x 48" of transformative fire (www.ingridoliphant.com/durga)

On Monday I went to an author-event at our beloved library, my personal sanctuary. Heather Hansman was with Amy Irvine to talk about her new book Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild.

I wasn’t sure why I went beyond the ritual ‘get out of the house so you don’t lose your mind’ outing. Free library stuff is usually a win all around but if I thought I’d be inspired, I was wrong. If I thought I’d be encouraged, I was wrong. If I thought I’d learn a little bit, I was not wrong but what I learned wasn’t on my radar, what I wanted to learn.

I watched these two women in comfortable conversation, one fueled by respect, camaraderie, and true curiosity about each other. What struck me most, like a fucking lightning bolt through my core, is that I haven’t had that. Maybe never or maybe it’s been so far back that I can’t remember what it felt like to be received, to be seen, without someone else shutting down because they ‘just can’t understand’ or literally fleeing in the other direction when I mention the dead.

Powerful loneliness has gaped through me since Monday. I’ve long known I’m lonely. I mean it’s hard to miss, right? I that I don’t have people (in bodies, anyway). I live so far outside the imaginations of most people that they cannot connect especially if I show up in the fullness of myself and, subsequently, I’ve learned that I cannot be anything other than my-full-self so I secrete myself away. Superficiality and I don’t meet. I just can’t do it any longer. I can’t do gossip, find talk of the weather as a communal connecting-point annoying, and I no longer want to be on the receiving end of others’ vitriol and fear. My cell is a bedroom, comfortably appointed but a cell nonetheless; a small space, very nunnish if you discount my liberal use of foul language and displeasure at the company of angels (Gabriel excepted).

The second thing I learned from Heather and Amy was that as much as they and other people love the outdoors and spaces we share with other things of nature and want to see them protected, I love the dead women that Ancestors and the Absolute Goodness of the Earth entrust me with.

I love them, in part, because they’re as discarded and discounted as I am. I love them, in part, because I carry their progenitors in my spine. I love them, in part, because others didn’t and don’t. I love them, in part, because they’re continued life beyond most human ideas of what is dead, show me what it means to really live and desire home beyond most human ideas of home. I love them, in part, because others are afraid of them. All of these parts of love bring me to the sum of it: I am them. And I am an active part of their continued lives until I bring them home. And I will continue doing this alone until someone else’s courage can match my own.

There was an encounter with someone on the street in April who, when I told him I’d be back out in the desert looking for remains of women, he didn’t try to quickly change or leave the conversation. In fact, for the first time in 8 years someone acknowledged the pain inherent in the work I do: “That must be really hard emotionally.” While I deflected so I would’t cry right there on the sidewalk he continued, “Of course you’re doing that work. You’re the person that created Durga,” with a striking tone of “duh”. Instead of running in the other direction, he gave me hug. I was seen. Daniel didn’t run away from me, didn’t doubt or interrogate the ‘rightness’ of my experience or suggest I adopt another interpretation that fit his view of the world. In fact, I fit into his view of the world and I was astonished that my truth was, without question, true to someone else. In those few moments on the street I had been received; I didn’t have to subdivide or subjugate anything of myself to fit into anyone else’s box of how I should be understood—I was just understood and allowed.

And I’ve not been touched by another person since.

This trip down Lonesome Lane has brought up other things: If I’m the second coming (that’s actually the 249th), human-god hybrid for this era how can I possibly connect with people who respond to me with fear of me or, conversely, want their own fears validated? If I’m to teach anew the truth of love, how can I do that while remaining the glorious entirety of me? How can I wholly attend to those in front of me without expecting reciprocity of same? Is that even possible? What’s the difference between judging something or someone as ‘not for me’ and judging the reasons behind the not-for-me-ness? How can I be the God for everyone as a stand-alone anomaly with the human experience? How can I be this love while existing on an island of singularity? Will it emerge without me doing a darn thing?

Vulnerability is weird. It’s a keyword, useful for SEO now but not an internalized way of being for most because it requires honesty. It’s like ‘weird’. Weird and vulnerability expressed by others are okay as long as we’re kept comfortable, it’s easy to see them as Other as soon as their lived experience frightens our sense of order. Our own weirdness and vulnerability are molded into another version of conformity even as our body and minds remind us how painful that box is. We tend to settle for a half-way compromise between stretching a little bit outside the confines while keeping parts of us tethered inside them; just enough to test the waters of others’ judgments.

As I dance with the idea of loneliness I also have to put myself under the microscope. People don’t generally ask me about my life or how I am. On the rare occasion they do, I feel the need to minimize or deflect because my heart doesn’t want to be rejected again. I don’t ask for more than the superficial from others, either, these days. If I do, the encounter becomes one to retrieve something of or for themselves or bring me to their level so they feel seen and heard themselves. Other’s anger at the world and trauma dumps are no longer tolerable. I can no longer be the constant mirror of their fear, their validation of their own lack of safety and other-hating. So, it’s clear I have a level of responsibility in my own silo-ed life.

To be clear, I like my own company. I don’t have to apologize for farting, can be interrupted by Ancestors without having to explain, I can laugh at my own very bad jokes and fully attend somewhat gracefully those around me. I’m alone 99.9% of the time and actually lonely that puny .1% but the questions it’s bringing up now are tied to the lack of community and feeling like the constant outsider, are real.

Though the contexts may be different, there are many, many others feeling the same way. I think we need to talk about it as much as we need to talk about mental health and politics and faith and spirituality and joy and pain because they’re not separate threads to be teased out of a knot. They’re integrally tied and woven into markets and ideas around human worth and attention and medicine and more.

Today, I’m mostly alone and not lonely. And now that the loneliness has scootched over, I am remembering something else that stood out in the author-talk: misbehaving women, ‘prickly’ women, women with their elbows out in the dogpile of (mostly) male judgments trying to save the world in the way that most touched their hearts in worlds where they were not wanted.

That awareness reaffirms my steadfastness and devotion to the women and girls buried and waiting to be buried by those who’d use them to death. I’m going to keep pissing off cops and a cartel and leadership in Indian Country that’s far too comfortable with the relationships that perpetuate the intentional disappearance of women and girls for sexual fodder for male-driven machines exploitation.

And I’ll stand alone in it until I don’t have to, with myself as myself (and with Durga).