Couldn’t Be Me: How to conquer holiday loneliness and horrible family members
In this week’s advice column: Holidays make heartache and loneliness hurt even more, but you don’t have to be miserable.
Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time for family cheer, but unfortunately our problems don’t go away during the holidays. There are a near-endless number of unhappy families, and individuals within those families who are dealing with their own particular issues, like isolation within their family and friends groups, or heartbreak. Regardless of the occasion, people still suffer.
This week, we look at some of those familial and individual problems to see whether we can find a way to salvage some happiness during what should be a wonderful time of year.
Anonymous:
These days I feel so isolated, even among crowds of people. Any ideas how to break free from it?
CBM:
This is one of the most relatable of human feelings, and one I can sympathize with. I also go through terrible periods of this, which always leads to a sort of self-exile that exacerbates the feeling of isolation. I imagine most people deal with this.
Humans are very particular creatures who are aware of our individual existences and the way we maintain the perception of ourselves. We police our own actions and rarely express ourselves openly and deeply to others. We fear that if we did, no one would accept us. We trick ourselves into believing others are so different from us, so distant, that there’s nothing we can do to bridge the gap. It’s amusing, really, that humans are always said to be social creatures.
I don’t think “loneliness” is the feeling that is most prominent in isolation. I think the best word for it I’ve come across is “forlornness.”
One of my favorite quotes comes from a letter Ingeborg Bachmann wrote to Paul Celan when he was going through a similar period of isolation. She said:
“It frightens me a great deal to see you floating out into a great sea, but I mean to build a ship and bring you back home from your forlornness. But you must also contribute something to that, and not make it too difficult for me. Time and many other things are against us, but we must not let it destroy what we want to salvage from it. Write to me soon, please, and tell me whether you still want to hear from me, whether you can still accept my tenderness and my love, whether anything else could help you, whether you will still reach for me sometimes and darken me with that heavy dream in which I want to become light.”
Their letters to each other are wonderful, but I tend to bring this particular passage up to my friends, because it describes the collaborative nature of the effort to save Celan from his isolation. “But you must also contribute something to that, and not make it too difficult for me.”
To escape from isolation takes work. When we’re in those moments when we feel alone, we tend to forget or ignore the many people who do love and care for us. The people who can save us from drowning in that great sea. People who are also in their own isolation but are reaching out. Just as you need those people to reach out, you also need to do the work of grabbing on to their hand and assisting your own rescue.
Put a simpler way, you have to fight the feeling of forlornness, because often you’re not as alone as you think. You can do things as simple as going out to events and finding people who share your interests, or simply expressing yourself openly to a friend who you trust. You’ll be surprised by how much of a relief it is to attempt connection, even for the people in your life who care and are also looking for someone to help them.
Lee:
My 28-year-old unemployed cousin (who has never held down a job longer than a couple of months) has become not just a burden to my mother and my aunt financially, but has now wreaked havoc by stealing from both of them, getting in trouble with the law, and talking to them in a way that is completely out of order. The family has tried interventions, threats, and even tried to help him find employment, but nothing is getting through to him.
He is a grown man, and on an ordinary day I would wash my hands off completely in the situation, but unfortunately his actions are making my mother’s life miserable. Today was her birthday and she couldn’t really enjoy it because of some drama with him playing with the electricity to spite her for scolding him about another thing he did.
She is older now, and she should be slowing down and getting ready for retirement, but he stresses her out. I’ve offered the suggestion to move from the family house, but she has her heart and her chicken business there, so that’s off the table. Is there any possible solution that would alleviate her from this mess?
CBM:
You have to be serious with your cousin here. It seems your mother and aunt don’t have the heart to shut him off, and he knows it, which is why he’s taking advantage of them. Their position is understandable: family is important, and I’m generally on the side of helping people rather than condemning them. I think this is a case where your cousin needs professional help, whether from a therapist or someone else. There have to be underlying issues that he’s not grappling with, causing him to be a terror to the same people who are looking out for him.
You might need to get creative in order to get him to take up that help. You might have to step in for your mother and aunt, and be firm with your cousin explaining he can be cut off from the family if he doesn’t reckon with his behavior. Don’t frame it as a threat, but as a revelation to him that he’s destroying his ties to the family himself. The interventions, threats, and efforts to help him find employment aren’t working, and I suspect won’t work, because he hasn’t addressed the root of his adverse behavior.
Only he knows what is behind his delinquency, and I think the most you can do is give him a way out. He has to help himself. Beyond that, I think your duty is to your mother and aunt, and to protecting them as much as you can, even if that means creating the distance between them and your cousin they’re incapable of creating on their own.
Anonymous:
Do you know something one could read after getting their heart broken in early autumn?
CBM:
I’m probably not the best person to talk to about good coping mechanisms, and I’m not sure if you want something that will console you. Many people, including myself, tend to gravitate to sad things that emphasize and capture our sadness, rather than relieve us of it. It’s why sad music is so popular.
Regardless, Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay is something I think captures the grief of a broken heart very well:
Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner
up the hill to his house, shadows
of limes and roses blowing in the car window
and music spraying from the radio and him
singing and touching my left hand to his lips.