The Lonely Hunter, page 23
He hadn’t cheated on me, had he? There was no guarantee of fidelity in our interactions, quite the opposite. If anything, he’d probably been cheating on the woman he was about to visit Mexico with when he spent those nights with me. I still felt like I’d been betrayed. The usual definitions of cheating and dating didn’t apply to us at all, though I was suffering like they had. Whether or not I had legitimate grievances, I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to stop interacting with the event or series of events that had brought me to this place.
I was still working through my haze. In between TV episodes, I pitched stories and ended up writing a piece about grief. I was thinking about death when I started. Then a therapist named Emily Adams expanded my scope. Adams worked as a marriage and family therapist at the Center for Mindful Psychotherapy in San Francisco. In an email, Adams told me that not everyone experiencing grief has lost someone to death. People grieve over the ends of relationships. They even grieve over the end of an idea, a dream they had for themselves or their lives.
She said that people tend to think of healing as a linear process. Most of us know the five stages of grief that are supposed to lead ultimately to acceptance. Apparently, recovery from loss is not like that at all.
“In my experience, people who are grieving bounce around from one stage to the next and not always in any particular order,” she wrote. “It is common that the grief process begins with denial and anger, but these experiences will come up much later in the grief process as well. Sometimes depression and acceptance show up first and anger is much later to rise.”
Adams’s explanation made me picture a spiral, dipping in and out of all these feelings, the rings getting wider so you can spend longer in acceptance, then, as the spiral turns, you feel angry about someone you haven’t thought of in ages. It wasn’t a perfect explanation for why it was taking so much out of me to get over Adrian, but it did make me understand I was mourning the loss of possibility I had felt in our time together much more than him as a person. I was mourning being a person in love, a state I hadn’t known in so long and was very aware was not guaranteed to come again. One moment I walked in acceptance, the next, I stepped into difficult feelings to walk for a stretch.
And I did then connect my feelings to grieving much bigger losses; I thought of my high school friend Raymond, who drowned in our late twenties, and how sometimes I’d see a picture memorializing him posted by mutual friends and weep like he died yesterday. And I remembered that loss took place around the start of my six years alone, marking the beginning of a retreat from the risk of loving someone you can lose.
In the midst of my angst, I told my mother about this connection, and how it just didn’t seem worth it to love anything you can’t keep.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she exclaimed. “Do you refuse to love a flower? Or a sunset? Things aren’t important because they never end, it’s because they’re fragile.”
A few years later, when coronavirus arrived and things shut down, grief hung in the air even as government officials pushed people to move past it and get back to work. As I write this, over six hundred thousand people in the United States have died of COVID-19. Along with these deaths leaving gaps in families, there were smaller losses to grieve in every individual: the end of a career, the separation from loved ones in quarantine, the loss of expectations around so many things people had planned and dreamed of for who knows how long before they were extinguished by a pandemic.
One of the most painful parts of all that loss was the rush to move on, when that’s not the way the heart heals at all. We can’t be forced to recover from pain and loss—it’s supposed to be a slow trudge, with lots of backward steps.
Researchers have been trying to figure out a way to skip all the pain. Hsu isn’t the only one working on the ways emotions are traced in the body’s pain receptors.
Stephanie Cacioppo is a scientist, and widow of the late scientist John Cacioppo. The two studied loneliness and its effects together. Then John died, leaving Stephanie to continue the work without her husband. She has been developing what could essentially be described as a daily pill for loneliness and is often discussed that way in articles about its development, whether Cacioppo would describe the pill that way or not.
Cacioppo works with a neurosteroid called pregnenolone, which has been shown to help with stress-related disorders and hypervigilance as a response to social threats, including chronic loneliness.
“If we could successfully reduce the alarm system in the minds of lonely individuals, then we could have them reconnect, rather than withdraw from others,” Cacioppo told The Guardian in 2019. When I first read about these pills, they sounded very similar to an antidepressant or antianxiety medication, even if the chemistry they’re working with is different. A pill can help people break out of their spirals; taking antidepressants helped me recover from grief after Raymond’s death, like a rope thrown to me in the water.
Reading about a medical “cure” for loneliness disturbed me anyway. That rope wasn’t a cure, if there is such a thing as a cure to fluctuating emotional states. I still had to pull myself hand over hand out of the stormy waves of depression. It had to be anchored to something, to friends and family, and there had to be a place for me to climb out and dry off that was safe and stable: I had an income, a home, a therapist. Cacioppo probably isn’t suggesting that her experimental medication would be the only recommended treatment for someone experiencing chronic loneliness. Frighteningly, the way the medical industry works now, it’s all too likely that lots of people who really need social services might end up getting a prescription instead.
When writing about Hsu’s research, Kinney talks about how recovering from rejection is seen as a character-building mission in American culture. Mental and physical health is treated like an individual responsibility in a similar way, yet mental health isn’t just something wrong with the chemical balance in your brain; it is largely influenced by what’s around you. Again, during COVID-19, a great deal of emphasis was put on personal responsibility, on social distancing and having things delivered and avoiding contact between households—disregarding that these weren’t options for many people.
The rate of hospitalization and death from coronavirus was highly disproportionate by race, with Black and Latino communities hit much harder than white ones. The Cleveland Clinic attributed much of this to economic factors, like working in front-facing “essential” jobs; living in more populated areas and multigenerational households, which disallowed isolation if someone got sick; and the lower likelihood of having medical insurance that would offer early treatment and testing. It was part of a long-established pattern of systemic racism in the medical industry playing out at a much more rapid pace, and not something any individual could manage alone.
The devastation of coronavirus was in some ways just a heightened version of what is happening to BIPOC communities all the time. Kinney wrote her piece before COVID-19, but much of what she says applies generally to surviving the structures of Western societies that demand so much and return so little:
Self-help guides, therapy, schooling, and all our cultural rules and norms determine whether our reactions to rejection are appropriate or excessive, reasonable or deranged. According to these standards, our ability to cope with rejection depends on maturity, resilience, and the hard work of self-improvement: we get over it, we shake it off, we cope, we move on, and, nevertheless, we persist. But what we call resilience comes at a huge material, financial, and psychological cost for those who, through no fault of their own, can rarely or never prevail against a system stacked against them.
A pill might help someone suffering from feelings of chronic loneliness who has a great deal of support. The systems created by white supremacy, ableism, transphobia, xenophobia, and more are what Kinney is referring to; a lonely person at the intersection of these types of discrimination is facing a very different battle to heal from rejection and isolation. Even the most chemically stable person would be exhausted and traumatized by them.
In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari discusses happiness in the context of human evolution, examining whether humanity has become happier or more dejected overall since the dawn of man. Since modern society is fascinated with how to feel and maintain happiness, there are many studies approaching the question: from sociological perspectives, from historical ones, and from basic chemical ones. The biochemist’s thoughts on happiness, from Harari’s account, is that a healthy brain tries to moderate our feelings. Even if you have a momentary burst of joy, you will eventually even out. The mind doesn’t like high highs any more than it likes low lows.
“To be happy is no more and no less than experiencing pleasant bodily sensations,” Harari writes. “Since our biochemistry limits the volume and duration of these sensations, the only way to make people experience a high level of happiness over an extended period of time is to manipulate their biochemical system.”
Harari suggests that the key to happiness is controlling how people feel through biochemical engineering, not through widespread improvements to their quality of life via social progress. From my reading, he’s being a little facetious; shortly after, he backs off the idea of distributing happiness pills, and writes that a more complicated and more accurate notion of happiness is a sense of meaning in life, the feeling that what you do is worthwhile, and a connection to those around you.
My understanding of what Harari is saying is that the recipe for happiness is feeling like you’re a meaningful part of the world and that the social barriers impeding you have been removed. Finding meaning in life is a very ill-defined directive, left to the individual; happiness is always more available to people who fit easily into the dominant, oppressive culture as it is. Kinney’s article makes a distinction between recovering from personal versus systemic rejection. By the latter standard, I had no serious problems at all. I’ll admit, though, that if I’d had a pill to take to never feel wretched about my personal rejections again, I might have swallowed it.
Time marched on. I came to the end of my HBO rewatch. I started to do things like enter coffee shops again. The intensity of my feelings faded, even if I occasionally sat straight up in bed muttering some variation of “How dare he!”
By this point, it was a few weeks until Christmas. I planned to return to New York for the holidays on the early side, to catch all the friends soon leaving for their own homes of origin. I’d been in L.A. for less than six months, so they probably didn’t miss me too much, but I missed them. I was packing my battered suitcase when the phone choo-chooed softly. It was a text from Xavier, one of my friends from the dinner party that inspired my original essay, the one that had set me off on a dating spree and caused me to fall in love then get heart-stomped. I hadn’t heard from him in a minute.
I’m writing ’cause I’m getting married, and I’d love it if you can join us to celebrate, he wrote, naming a date when, serendipitously, I would be in town. He sent a picture of himself grinning in the park with his bride-to-be, plus an image of the homemade block-print invitation to their reception.
She’s gorgeous! I enthused. And stylish. Can’t wait to meet her.
She’s really great and I’m so very happy, he replied. Direct, impactful words. The last we had talked, Xavier had been dating a woman in an open marriage who had a young child, and he hadn’t seemed content. We’d known each other a long time. Sometimes when you know a friend for a long time you don’t check in with them as frequently as you should; it’s easy to take the relationship for granted, and I’d let things slide because it felt like anytime we wanted we could pick up right where we left off.
In a way, that was correct. I arrived on the day of Xavier’s wedding at the same house where that dinner had taken place more than two years ago, the same place where Rachel and Jon had been married. There were a lot of familiar faces. Again, it was mostly people whom I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. Jon and Rachel were there, wearing their wedding rings. I met Xavier’s new wife, Bella, whom he’d married at the courthouse that morning. She was a bit reserved and looked at her husband with a reverence that felt almost too intimate to witness.
The house was bubbling over with people and food. The tables were piled high with fresh baked bread, sliced cheese and fruit, homemade tamales, rice and beans, three kinds of soup (which proved difficult to distribute), roasted vegetables, kale salads, and desserts. A small table soon overflowed with bottles of wine as more well-wishers arrived, the brownstone’s stairs creaking incessantly under the tread of visitors’ feet.
I tried to do my part by grabbing a glass of champagne, and ran into one of Xavier’s old roommates, Dan, a guy who always brought up his girlfriend in conversations with me by the second or third sentence.
“Hey, Dan!” I said. “Nice to see you. What’s new?”
“Well, my girlfriend and I are just making plans for the holidays,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied, sipping my drink. We traded a few more pleasantries, and then I wandered down the hall to join Jon and Rachel.
“Dan always does this thing where he immediately mentions his girlfriend to me, like he’s trying to let me down gently,” I said. It seemed like the time to air this very specific complaint.
“Oh my goodness, yes,” exclaimed Jon. “He does this. I’ve noticed him doing this to other women, too.”
Rachel confirmed she’d also heard him say similar things. I wondered aloud, “Does he really think he needs to warn everyone off?”
Jon shook his head. “I think he is reminding himself.”
This conversation produced some gloomy thoughts about commitment at a party celebrating it. I thought about Adrian, who should have reminded himself he had a girlfriend before sleeping with me again. To address those feelings, I went looking for more cheese. As I turned away from the buffet table, a woman with glasses and a head of short curls smiled and waved hello, then embraced me.
“Hiiiii,” I said, not really knowing who she was. A man behind her was carrying an older toddler, and they were clearly together. That’s when I realized it was Xavier’s former lover, attending his wedding. Not surprising, considering their ability to navigate complicated situations. It was a reminder of how much of this story I didn’t know.
I found Xavier standing alone for a moment by the staircase. He was smiling gently to himself, a beatific expression that made me impulsively reach out and hug him. We drew apart, holding each other’s forearms.
“It’s so good to see you!” I said.
“I know! I’m so glad you could be here, but it’s so hard to talk to people as the host. Quick. What is going on with you?”
I gave a very short summary of life in Los Angeles. He told me a bit about how long he and his wife had been seeing each other, and their plans for where they would soon be living. Eventually, I leaned in to ask if I could inquire about something more personal.
“Of course,” he said.
“What happened with you and your last girlfriend? I just saw her and was curious how that all ended.”
Xavier told me that he had been seriously dating the married woman for three years when she and her husband had decided to move upstate. Something already challenging was compounded by a lengthy commute.
“It just got to the point where I was feeling so fed up and so bad,” he said. “One day I just decided, ‘Today I’m going to be really nice to myself.’ I went out and bought a new pair of running shoes, because I love running. And I took myself out for a nice meal. And I sat in the park. And then I got a text from a friend.”
The text said that the friend had another friend, a girl named Bella. Bella had seen a picture of Xavier on Tinder that she recognized from a photo series made by their mutual pal.
“I had deleted Tinder off my phone. I never looked at it,” he said. But Bella had thought he was cute and asked their photographer friend to reach out and see if he’d be interested in getting a cup of coffee.
“Sure, why not,” he told his friend. He met Bella that very same day. Their date lasted four hours.
It was exactly the kind of story I’d always hated being told as a single person—just alter your headspace and love will slide right in. The only real difference was that this wasn’t some anecdote I was hearing from my mom about her doctor’s niece’s stepsister’s catsitter. This was a story from my friend. I could see for myself how happy he was.
The thing to focus on was probably that Xavier had met his true love. Instead, I kept thinking about him deciding to be nice to himself instead of waiting for somebody else to be nice to him. It was similar to my impulses toward expensive self-care, except Xavier hadn’t seen that care as part of a self-improvement campaign. He’d just wanted to feel good again, with no other purpose. His voice when he described making that decision had been so full of relief. I could almost taste the wonder of setting aside a failed love affair and finally moving the fuck on. Almost.
It was a formless dream. I wasn’t sure anymore how to do it: to feel good with no agenda, to do something with no thought of it being recognized by anyone except you. Not asking for anyone else to choose you and say you were worthy, nothing to satisfy except your own expectations of what makes a worthwhile life. It was suddenly a much more arresting subject than what a relationship with another person would look like. Even if I didn’t know how, I was inspired to try to wake up sometime very soon and say, “Today, I’m going to be really nice to myself.”
CHAPTER 15
New Ceremonies
