Why I'm Grateful for My Isolation Era (Yes, Really)
why do I keep pulling the ten of swords
I write because it’s what I do best, and Reasons for Living is where I share my most personal, thoughtful work—the kind of essays that don’t fit anywhere else. If you enjoy what I write, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber.
Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month and other bonus things that I think of in the middle of the nighjt.
Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.
If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Also: if you’re unable to afford a subscription due to financial constraints, please email me at info@esmewang.com and I’ll comp you a paid subscription, no questions asked.
Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.
I’m about to do what all the Substack Experts™ tell you not to do, because who cares and also I feel like it. I’m going to tell you what’s on my mind. Forget lessons. Forget “something to take away from this beautifully written piece of froth.” I just want to speak plainly about what’s been going on, now that I’m back from Trauma Camp (the in-the-middle-of-nowhere-retreat for women survivors of child sexual abuse), seem to be emerging from my depression, and am eating food again instead of chugging the cheap brand of Ensure for every meal. This swan cake looked so beautiful that I had to make it the main image of this newsletter.
I should mention that I am obsessed with the look of cakes, as in, carbohydrate desserts (I’m sorry that I even have to clarify that). There’s someone on my Notes feed who is constantly posting their spectacular baking results, God bless them, and I almost always repost them because I want everyone in the world to see too. I also own a jewelry box by an artist I found on Instagram who makes boxes that look like Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette cakes. I used to keep my pills in it, but that made me feel too much like a living Tumblr post, so I stopped.
One of the things that I learned at Trauma Camp* is that people who have undergone that particular kind of trauma at a young age are often people who isolate out of self-preservation. I’m sure that people who have not experienced that type of trauma may lean toward isolation as well for all kinds of reasons, but almost everyone who was at Trauma Camp with me was deeply into solitude. I will sometimes catch myself realizing that I haven’t left the house in weeks. Yes, C and Daphne live with me as well, but I still spend long periods alone—which is the way I feel safest and the most comfortable—and then, when I either feel the rare yearning to be with others or feel like I should be with others to not be rude, I leave my room. I make an effort to socialize.
For example: last night, C and I watched Love Hurts together on the couch, which is a Ke Huy Quan movie that we’d really been looking forward to AND also happens to have received a 19% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not far into the movie, C began to declare which actors they’d actually wanted to use, simply because so many people in the film looked like a lesser version of an actor whom people actually know about. Unfortunately, it turned out that sometimes those actors were actually the household names. The poor man’s version of Sean Astin was… Sean Astin. “HE WAS REALLY SEAN ASTIN!” I screamed to C from the bathroom. Dear Samwise: I’m sorry.
You might be thinking to yourself, But Esmé, watching a movie together isn’t really socializing, and you may be right, which is why nobody recommends that you go to a movie on a first date. Which reminds me that I have a story about the time a friend of C and myself went on a first date with a girl to… Brokeback Mountain. That’s not the bad part, although I don’t know if I personally would want to watch a groundbreaking Ang Lee drama based on an Annie Proulx short story about two gay cowboy/rancher types being madly in love and dying miserable… on a first date. The bad part is what happened after they finished watching the movie.
Our friend, whom I will call Bob, simply did not understand why the movie was so tragic.
“Because they couldn’t be together,” someone explained. “Society wouldn’t let them be together, even though they were in love. And then they were punished for it.”
“But I have to do things I don’t want to do all the time,” Bob said. “Like, I have to wear a tie to work every day.”
Dear Reader, Bob was not joking. I have since asked C if Bob might be neurodivergent in some way, and C, who has known Bob since they were kids, does not think so. (Instead: failure of imagination? Lack of empathy? A deep, sincere, true hatred of neckties?)
If I think of a world in which I had to go see Brokeback Mountain with someone in a potentially romantic fashion and listen to them explain that it wasn’t that sad because of neckties, I would probably never leave the house again.
C likes to suggest that we go on walks. Daphne likes walks; dogs should be walked; it would be a way to spend time together. But so much time upright, as someone with POTS, is excruciating to think about, particularly because I find walks horrendously boring. Now that I think of it, I may have always found walks horrendously boring. There’s something about the much-hated experience of upright movement that makes me want to rush to finish the experience, therefore removing any enjoyment that might result from whatever’s around me. C likes to suggest that we go on walks where I bring my Polaroid and take photos. No! The purpose of a walk is to get back home ASAP.
People used to get mad at me because when walking together, I’d somehow end up two blocks ahead of whomever I was walking with, having not noticed that my speed was not the speed of my companion. New Yorkers have called me a fast walker. I walked very fast everywhere in college and graduate school; now that I think of it, it may not have been because of the fear of being late so much as it was wanting to get the walking over with.
So I don’t walk that much. I spend a lot of time alone in our flat. If I’m in a spell of bad health, I lie in bed and listen to audiobooks or podcasts about “Vanderpump Rules.” If I’ve managed to reach baseline or better-than-baseline, I become a workaholic who takes on a million projects at a time before I collapse back into bad health, which is usually the result of feeling the extreme urgency of getting things done before I can’t anymore. But in my better days, when I feel the grandeur of the world before me and am convinced of life’s many possibilities, I space out the day so that I do one or two large things (shower, have a phone call, work on my novel) per day and spend the rest of the day recuperating.
We just closed registration for The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy yesterday. I often wonder if people know how much work goes into something like a launch for a new version of the Academy, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. I’m relieved that the selling part of it is over(ish) for now. I can focus on teaching and taking care of the students we have in our gorgeous new cohort, and I’m already excited about it. There is so much to do, you know. So much to see. So much, so much, so much. ❤️
*I do plan to pitch a piece about this to a magazine soon.
I write because it’s what I do best, and Reasons for Living is where I share my most personal, thoughtful work—the kind of essays that don’t fit anywhere else. If you enjoy what I write, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber.
Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month and other bonus things that I think of in the middle of the nighjt.
Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.
If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Also: if you’re unable to afford a subscription due to financial constraints, please email me at info@esmewang.com and I’ll comp you a paid subscription, no questions asked.
Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.
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