Reflections on Life: Isolation

While I was on vacation this past week, I read a couple of good books.  One I'm not quite finished with, so I'll withhold commentary on it until I do, but the other I connected with in a way I wasn't expecting.

Born To Run is Bruce Springsteen's autobiography.  Now, some of you might be rolling your eyes, knowing what a Springsteen fan I am.  Of course I'd like it; of course I'd connect to it.  What spoke to me, though, was more what he wrote about his psychological make-up.  In some ways, reading what he wrote lifted the veil from my eyes about my own life.

Springsteen grew up in a home surrounded by a large and extended family.  Yet, many times in his life he describes himself as being driven to isolation.  This was particularly the case in his relationship with women.  They didn't last more than 2-3 years until he was headed for the hills.  He didn't want to open up enough to take that step to really feel deserving of love and tended to isolate himself physically and mentally as a way of protecting himself.

The way he described it was all too familiar to me.  Unlike Springsteen, though, I think I was more conditioned to it.  I was adopted and was an only child to parents who were 39 & 40 when they got me.  In our extended family, I was the youngest, and quite a bit younger than my cousins.  I had friends in my neighborhood, and this was a time when there weren't "play dates" so we were free to go "call for" friends whenever we wanted to, even at a young age.  At this time, my neighborhood was predominantly Roman Catholic and Jewish families.  Once school started, pretty much all of my neighborhood friends attended the Roman Catholic school of our local parish.  Any connections I had as I moved into my school years were gone.

There were no friends I had in elementary school that were in my immediate area.  I was involved in Girl Scouts, so I had that after school.  I went to my church and had Sunday school, but faced the same situation there.  All of my church friends, except one, attended a different school than me and the one that was in my school didn't live too close to me.

My life was filled with isolation from the start, and not self-imposed the way Springsteen's was.  I was conditioned to do things on my own and figure things out for myself; to keep myself entertained.  The same was true in high school.  Although I had a lot of good friends there (many whom I still keep in touch with) there were none "right around the corner" from me that I could just go outside and hang with.  I was eager for company and companionship - maybe a bit too eager at times for some.

I was brave at a young age.  By 14 I could take the bus and subway into NYC on my own.  How many of you would let your 14 year old ride a bus and subway by themselves?  I don't think my kids were ever capable of that. The isolation I felt drove me to push limits and figure stuff like this out on my own.

This early conditioning for me did the same thing Springsteen spoke about.  It drove me mentally to turn inwards when things weren't good.  When a good friend I has a crush on who occasionally had walked home with me died while we were still in high school, it was hard.  I felt like I had no one to talk to about it and I turned it all inward.  My parents weren't good with any of this stuff at all - we definitely had a huge generation gap.  It wasn't malicious, they just didn't know.  I wouldn't talk to people about stuff - just put on the brave face and do what I thought was expected while inside I was a mess - and isolated.

After high school I managed to forge relationships in the workplace, although I had little patience for the cattiness of many of my fellow female workers. We didn't really hang out together, except for one really good friend I made who worked in the same building as me for a different company.  My friends from high school had mostly all gone to college.  I didn't right away.  I chose to work until I decided I wanted better than what I had.  This meant when vacation time rolled around, I was once again on my own. I couldn't grab a bunch of friends and go somewhere. I was isolated by the fact that everyone I knew seemed to be in a different place in their lives than I was.

I did a lot of what Springsteen did - I pushed people away because I was used to isolation as a defense mechanism.  They can't hurt you if they can't get close to you.  Any time I did try to let someone get close, it seemed that it ended the same way, so I pushed them away.  There were times even as my children were growing that I felt isolated from them.  Even as I held them as babies, I'd feel like I wasn't as connected to them as I should be.  Now I think I was so conditioned to isolation that while I loved them, I was still isolated.  At work I was always described as "independent" and a "self starter."  Yes, because on my own was the best.  Working nights as the only staff person in the hotel was a blessing.

What's worse is the times I did let people in, they sent me back to isolation.  After my daughter died, I NEEDED people around me.  More than ever before I needed to make connections.  The people I counted on the most for that sent me back to isolation, essentially telling me to work it out for myself.    When I asked a friend to come over and watch movies with me, she couldn't be bothered.  I heard excuses like she couldn't climb stairs, while at the same time she was volunteering at a community theater where she regularly climbed ladders and did more.  The answer was obvious: she didn't want to be around me.  It took a while for me to figure that out because I believed the excuses she gave me that let her continue to be a good person in her own mind, while having no grounding in reality.  Other friends promised to be there when I needed them, but treated my cries for help as more of a bother, especially as time went on.

I think there are a lot of people out there like me.  You think you know these people, but you don't.  They take care of themselves in their own way and in their own minds.  I was surprised to read this about Springsteen.  You'd think with all these people around him, he wouldn't have a problem with isolation, but he did just the same.  He had to work out issues on his own for a long time, and sometimes he didn't do the right thing.  He admits to that now.  I am sure in my life there are many times I have not made the right choices.  Don't think for a minute, though, that we don't put a lot of thought into our mistakes.  It's just we do a lot of our decision-making in the vacuum of isolation, intentionally or not.