Lifting the Lonely

By Danielle Cotter Griggs
@agaggleofgriggses

Let’s take a little quiz, shall we?

You know you’re not in a great place when you cry over:

A) your favorite podcast hosts breaking up the act
B) the last session of your pelvic floor therapy
C) the opening of “Barbie: Big City, Big Dreams”

D) all of the above.

This is not the kind of adult quiz I was led to expect when I snuck peeks at old issues of Cosmo in the salon waiting area as a teen, but here we are.

Michael Hobbes has left “You’re Wrong About,” the podcast that’s one of the only things that kept me afloat during quarantine. I am no longer leaking pee all the time, which means I no longer have an excuse to spend an hour a week chatting with my physical therapist while we repair my baby-battered body. And my girls will never understand that I, too, was once like young Barbie “Malibu” Roberts, full of talent and ambition, dropped into the Big Apple and determined to make my mark.

This particular meltdown is not really about the podcast, of course. It’s that I could listen and feel like I was hanging out with friends when I spend most of every day alone with people who think fruit snacks are a food group.

It’s probably not about the end of my friendly relationship with my physical therapist, either, and more about the fact that my weekly appointment was my only activity approaching anything like self-care.

And it’s definitely not about a teenaged cartoon Barbie and her summer arts camp in New York City, but instead about the indescribable distance I feel from the version of me that moved to the big city with big dreams of my own.

Now I am crying, again, in the Target parking lot while my two youngest daughters snore in the back of the van. A van. I drive a van. What happened to me? I am buried under the rubble of an illusion about who I was, who I am, and who I thought I’d be.

I pick up my phone to text a fellow mama who knew me when I was built more like Barbie (even if my attitude has always been solidly in the Skipper camp).

“I think I’m losing my mind,” I type. And then delete.

“I feel like I’m not a person anymore.” Type; delete.

“Are you ever just massively lonely?” Type; delete. Type again. Sit with the load of this implicit confession. Send.

Lonely is a loaded word. It carries the weight of a thousand nights of broken sleep, the breadth of hundreds of miles driven between appointments and activities that are not mine, and the depth of my guilt at daring to use such a word to describe what a full and privileged life. A good life, a life I love and on better days am honestly happy with.

How can someone who doesn’t even pee alone feel lonely?

I am in the middle of typing, “Never mind, I’m just a grouch,” when her reply comes back.

“Every. Damn. Day.”

Suddenly, the lonely lifts a bit.

This is it, I think. This is what I am lonely for––acknowledgement without judgment, no context needed. We have both been there.

Two decades ago, we bonded over frozen margaritas and those skinny cigarettes she bought as a prop for our sophomore year scene study course. There are no more happy hours or hook-ups or long nights at the hookah bar. There are, thank you Lord, fewer hangovers. Our lives no longer revolve around cast lists and costumes, and we don’t bar hop in heels. That life, and the me who lived it, feel light years away—so distant that if I’m not careful, I could almost forget it happened.

But she won’t.

And somewhere, at the end of a desperate text, is someone who remembers me, the old me, and the new me, and everything I have been in between. She remembers the time we nearly got in a bar fight with members of the British Navy because we said they sounded like Shrek, and the time we had coffee across from Rider Strong (be still my beating heart…) at a cafe in the East Village, and he was wearing a leather jacket just like he did on “Boy Meets World,” and the time I bought that lucky off-the-shoulder striped tunic for seven dollars at H&M and wore it absolutely everywhere for two years.

She’s not going to roll her eyes when I say again that I hung out with Greta Gerwig once. She was there, too, and she knows this is as close as I’ll ever get to being cool. She knows I only get my haircut with bangs when I’m in an emotional crisis, and she will both try to talk me out of it and also reassure me that said bangs are “cute and edgy.” She knows no matter how messy my house gets now, it will never be as gross as the sublet I rented where we listened to the mice burrowing in my mattress.

She remembers me, and that helps me remember me and the many holes I have clawed myself out of. And with her acknowledgement I feel a little less like I am drowning under lonely. We can talk with the honesty of shared years, about babies and burdens carried and lost or let go, mistakes made and mended and molded again into adult lives resplendent with resilience.

Over the last twenty years, we’ve traded late nights at dive bars for early mornings in minivans, sleepovers of salacious confessions for snippets of adult conversation in between school drop off routines, spelling out the juicy stuff so the kids don’t catch on. Instead of dishing about dates, we’re talking about diapers and weaning and being so sick of “Blippi” and never knowing what to make for dinner.

There’s joy, too. Toddler slang, new wallpaper, and finding good Tupperware on sale. Work milestones for her, small creative victories for me.

The thing is, the content doesn’t matter. What matters is the whisper I hear under every conversation that says, “We are still in here.” We are still who we were, and we are still becoming more. It’s a whisper that blows away a leaden cloud of lonely. A whisper that drowns out the voice in my head telling me I am all gone, static, done.

I still have that H&M tunic in my attic. She still has a deeply dark, sarcastic sense of humor, and probably some of my luggage in her basement––from that time I didn’t have anywhere to send my stuff after graduation. And our friendship is still a lifeline that lifts even the heaviest words, so I can see myself again.

Guest essay written by Danielle Cotter Griggs. Danielle is a writer, musician, and actor. She's a rookie in the stay-at-home mom game but is working on perfecting her new role as Arbiter of Turns and Provisioner of Snacks. She did not get her Christmas cards out this year. She lives in Central Massachusetts with two cats, three daughters, and one very patient, unusual husband. You can follow her adventures on her website.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.