post grad

I am lonely and it is OK.

April 28, 2017 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

There is a thing we do not always like to tell people who are graduating from high school or college, with the result that they hear of it in whispers and snatches—a specter they, too, try to ignore. And some of them escape it; they go home, or they go to graduate school, plopped down into a new life with a readymade cohort of like-minded young people. But most of us go to jobs in cities new to us, seeking adventure and success, and we find them, but we also encounter that specter. Its name is loneliness.

There are different kinds of loneliness, but we do not have names for them. It would be nice if we did. If we could throw out an offhanded comment like, ‘I’ve got a bit of the usual topodoloria that one expects three weeks after moving somewhere new,” instead of having to stay mum or else burst out: “I wish one single thing felt familiar in this place besides the coffee mug I’m carrying around obsessively because it reminds me of home.”

We need words for the loneliness of a long-distance relationship, the unreasonable rage at happy, cuddling couples when it is still weeks til you hold your person and something finally unknots inside of you. The ache of being single and wanting not to care, but thinking you would do anything to avoid one more engagement photo in your feed. The effort of trying not to weep at a party because you only wish you had people to feel safe with. The disappointment of a perfect summer evening when you have no one to give a beer on your porch.

Why does saying “I’m lonely” feel like admitting weakness, like if you had to foist the news on people that you had a disease? In a culture so far removed from the tribes and villages that have held most humans in history—a culture designed for loneliness—we don’t know how to talk about it. (I imagine this conundrum is even worse if you are male.) So we eat food or watch porn or shop to assuage the emptiness. We scroll social media looking for the rush of momentary connection. We hit the gym or log extra work hours because if we can’t feel fulfilled, maybe we can at least appear successful.

Well, everybody, I’ve done all those things and they were hardly even momentary fixes and I am done being afraid of it. I’m lonely. And it’s not because my existing friends (or my husband) are inadequate; and it’s not because I am abhorrent; and it’s not that I am inordinately needy. I fall well within the normal human range of neediness. Here is why I am lonely: because I moved. Because people my age move constantly in my culture and no one is supposed to make a big deal out of it. But you don’t find and love and trust your people overnight, the people who make you snort-laugh and tell you when you’re being dumb and are good at giving you gifts. It takes a lot of friend dates, awkward party situations, mild rejections by people who are too busy for you, testing of sense-of-humor waters, weekend nights hiding with Netflix because it’s all so exhausting. What it takes, like anything worth building, is time and effort.

Meanwhile, you will be lonely. At least some of the time, it will occur to you that you’d like to share something with someone, and there will not be anyone, and it will ache.

Here is how to live with the ache:

First, you must ignore your feelings. Not the ache itself, but the momentary feelings that keep you from making and being a friend. Read this article. Trust the rational voice in your head—the one telling you that calling a faraway friend is what you need when you’ve reached the end of your feeds; or that that one person deserves a third or fourth chance even though you’ve already grabbed a magic marker to label them annoying; or that drinking alone is unhealthy and it would be better to walk, bake, or color through that ache.

Then you really must put on your confident pants and go to the damn party. (Or the church, or the meetup, or the networking event.) Yes, you will be out too late and spend several awkward minutes standing alone next to the food table. Yes, there will be obnoxious people and fake people there. But the people you’re wishing for aren’t going to come knocking; they’re putting on their pants to go to the party and maybe make small talk with you and maybe accept your invitation to coffee or trivia. Think of your beautiful friends walking around other cities and going to other parties. Your people are out there.

Trust the process. Be patient with friendships in early stages. Grow a plant from a seed. Be faithful to the little tasks of tending them. Know that the ache, though overwhelming, will not overwhelm forever.

In the meantime, pray and pray and pray. Jesus was so lonely, dear heart. How often have you wished for the head space to reach toward him? Let the ache push you to God. Be still. Pray for others. Is this not a gift, to ache for connection, to feel the gaps in the universe where we have been broken from each other? Grow more tender and more grateful. Become a person with names for lonelinesses, and give the gift of recognition, and look the lonely in the eye and share something with them. We are already more connected than we can know.

How to Be At Home in Discomfort: 1,000,000 Easy Steps

April 19, 2017 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Boston will never be—if I had lived there ten years, would not have been—home. But I will always love it like I can never love another place. When I was in high school, I dreamed of being a young professional there, of living in a historical brick home and riding the train; lazing afternoons on the Common and laughing over takeout with friends in my garret. I never have a stronger urge to go back to talk to a former self, purely for the joy of seeing her face. When I think of those high school dreams, I am at once in awe that I achieved them and astounded by how small they were. How could high-school-me fathom becoming one of those bike commuters whizzing down Beacon Hill, dodging Duck Boats? Or working in the city’s underbelly as a caterer in the basements of its best museums?

Of course, I don’t think I could tell her about the highs of a night skyline in summer without the lows of predatory landlords and an exhausted hour-long commute at 2 A.M. The very specific loneliness of being crushed by people on the sidewalk, and how it doesn’t feel less lonely to know that they’re all lonely, too.

No one has ever really asked me what locals do in Boston, but high-school-me would. I would tell her that if you are middle-class or better off, you go to graduate school. I played an ultimate stereotype—passing through the city, using it for its books, and leaving more liberal than I came—but Boston never once derided me for sticking to that tired script. At least, I would tell myself, I had a dirty job. At least I walked many miles on my days off, til the map was part of me.

Other things locals do: put 80% of your income toward rent and heat. Crowd the neighborhood bar that has the cheapest Sam Summer once the temperature in your place tops 95. If you live on the green line, plan your days around the Sox, Celtics, or Bruins. If you do not live on the green line, refuse to ride the green line. Swear.

You see now, whenever I try to describe my fondness for Boston I tell only gritty, boring, maybe-depressing scenes. Maybe because everyone knows the bright, idyllic Boston I met in high school: sailboats on the Charles and rapturous cannoli. But it is also because I went to The North to get out of my Comfort Zone, and Boston did it for me—three years of unceasing discomfort.

Boston was full of people demanding I confront my privilege without offering an inkling as to how. It was also fond of judging my home states while itself remaining demonstrably among the country’s most racist, most segregated places. Boston gave me several weeks inventing new food combinations until I could buy groceries with the next paycheck. It was one spiritual or theological or identity crisis after another, culminating in my own personal Great Evangelical Betrayal.

All of that—it was a gift: much more than I bargained for, indeed. And through all of my throes and thrashing, Boston held me without sentiment and without judgment. Now there are sides of me that only the Charles knows. There are places I’d put my own historical markers: on this site in 2014, Lyndsey learned to be friends with women. Here, here, here, and here, she realized things were going to be OK. L and L once walked a marathon in a weekend, which began and ended here.

If you want to visit the shiny, nice, historical Boston, I can tell you where to go and wish you a very good time. But if you want to visit my Boston, I will tell you: walk and walk, then keep walking. Ask why things are the way they are. Tell the Charles you are in love with him. Get very sweaty and lost. Buy bread in the North End. Realize you have gone much too far. Then turn around and come back. And when you arrive wherever you started, and you are terribly exhausted and your bread is gone and you are grateful for a place to just be, then you are there. Share a three-dollar bottle of wine with someone and toast the safety of a cyclist and belatedly thank God, who happens to be around, for the bread. Swear. Swear especially if it makes you uncomfortable. It is good not to be so delicate; and so this Boston will make you a better person—a better lover—in the end.

This post was inspired by Tsh Oxenreider’s At Home in the World, a book about home and other beloved places and a nine-month trip around the world with three kids. I love her Art of Simple life-vision, so I can’t wait to see how it translates to the un-simple endeavor of travel with family.

a blank space, baby

October 19, 2016 by Lyndsey 3 Comments

One day Nate and I decided to move from Plymouth, Massachusetts to Charleston, South Carolina, and three weeks later we did it. I think I was about as ready as anyone can be for something like that. I think I was about 80% ready.

And usually with these huge changes, I’ve been a lot less ready—but someone else has been ready for me. Americorps, grad school, they had routines and duties and people lined up for me to throw myself into. I knew people who’d moved to new cities completely alone after college, but I couldn’t relate to them. I envied them their spending money and their professional-wardrobe jobs; only now can I even approach any understanding of the crushing loneliness they must have felt, dropping their keys every night in whatever tiny apartment they had found. Of what it’s like to feel a riptide pulling you away from your perfectly fine life, to follow it with some excitement, and then to ask the ocean several times when you’ll be there until you realize that this, treading water in this wide nothing, is it.

In our case, we went from spending, collectively, four hours a day commuting, to forty minutes a day. We went from having four or five groups of people we could make weekend plans with, to zero. From a little downtown church we liked to the land of a thousand (seemingly identical) churches. From a cozy little house that seemed made of windows to an apartment whose blank white walls seem to expand, retreating us farther into the dim building, overnight. I went from a bustling startup office space 40 hours a week to working from home 30 hours a week.

It’s been an eerily quiet few weeks.

—

I bought Shauna Niequist’s Present Over Perfect on a bit of a whim, and when I started reading it, one little chunk at a time, trying to drag it out and absorb everything, I was immediately disappointed. The writing was so lovely and funny and honest, the story so familiar and yet different from mine, but the whole entire damn thing is all about living a slower, more grounded life. About eliminating commitments and half-real relationships and tasks of imaginary importance.

To say that I resented being told I should do what I was being forced to do would be an understatement. My eyes would travel from the book to my blank planner to Nate, my only human connection within a four-hour drive, and somehow, knowing that millions of people would revel in this state of affairs only made me deeply, inexplicably bitter toward those people. But Shauna kept drawing me in. And I started cooking.

It’s our shared love of elaborate meals that will keep me reading every book Niequist writes until the end of time. If at every other hour of the day I hated feeling alone, unuseful, and boring, I was able to lose myself in cooking. I gloried in our new dishwasher. Our CSA shares started coming, baskets brimming with local food, and this, at least, made me feel that the ground of South Carolina was mine, too. I made bread. Nate made me breakfast sandwiches out of it.

And some combination of that near-daily ritual with Shauna’s gentle words—full of wonder at how lovely the quiet life can be—soon made me half-grudgingly, half-elatedly realize that this little window is a gift. Who in the world gets to make food for their family every day? How many people are ever offered such a blank slate after they’ve grown up a little, figured out what they really want? How often does anyone get such extravagant margins with which to decide how they will live? How many books would my favorite mama-writers have written in the amount of time I’ve already wasted?

These questions, though, they often take on the tone of your life. When I was still thinking of this time as an exile, they felt accusatory. Of course I knew I should be grateful. Of course I was inadequate to the task of making the most of the situation.

Until, as is usually the case with me, I started pretending to be the good person I wasn’t.

I just got tired of railing against the situation, and stopped. And then there was even more of the dreaded, horrible quiet.

And then there was a whisper: stop seeking. just wait.

And in that blank space, like floating in water, the beginnings of a life began to emerge, one little thing at a time. Not the things that are, like, recognizable as a life—a full schedule and a full travel mug of coffee and a car and people who breathlessly tell you how much they appreciate you as you pass each other rushing in different directions. Just, the realization that I am not only able but, in fact, driven to collect as many houseplants as possible. Just a little writing opportunity I wouldn’t have found if it weren’t for my new days off. A cascade of writing ideas where before there had been only overwhelm. A few prayers besides the same frustrations, fears, and questions I’d been hurling at the sky the past many months. And a lot of fresh-vegetable meals.

This may not be anyone else’s definition of success, but this is my life. This is the life I get to say yes to, one little thing at a time.