After stepping across that bridge for some nuptials, going to Paris for a honeymoon, then returning back to Park Slope for the beginning of my marriage, some thoughts started to knock around inside me. Naturally, I did my best to avoid all of them. I mean, I was busy starting a new chapter. I was out of the music business, out of the clutch of feeling I needed to deliver, live up to, do and say all the cool, hip things. I was starting a new chapter of my life about to turn forty and thinking about my future possibilities. Thinking in this case was less an action word and more a placeholder. An I’ll-get-into-a-full-investigation-soon stance. Because underneath all the underneath, I knew if I deep-dived, I’d end up in some murkiness that would require me to look very closely at who I was and what I wanted. And honestly in that moment, as I remember it, I had very little clue. My general memory of those times was a prickly sense of wanting out of where I’d been. My finances were a mess, my friendships were complicated, my career was at a crossroads. I didn’t really know a way forward so I chose retreat.

I think retreat can work if it’s in the service of regrouping or actually taking honest stock of a situation. In my case though, I did not do either of those things. I burrowed deeper into a relationship that wasn’t whole. The outward-facing bit of it was jolly: We were great friends. But the inward moments couldn’t support me, no matter how hard I tried. And while I did try, I also stayed willfully ignorant of any signs pointing toward, Hey, maybe you want to ask some questions about where he’s going in the middle of the night and why you’re OK with that? Or why you’re not wondering about the fact that neither of you are interested in being intimate with the other? Or just simply having a conversation about what the future of us looked like.

Last week I read this quote: “I got married to avoid myself. I am divorced to confront solitude.” Boy-o-boy-o-boy did that hit like a big ole Chuck Barris gong. Solitude of the emotional kind. That was a thing most terrifying. No matter that I prided myself on liking my alone time, that being an only child, I felt I didn’t need anyone (somehow I connected the no-sibling thing to that. More mental mysteries.). I was usually thrilled to have whole days, nights, whatever, to myself. I’d taken vacations solo and had had a blast wandering, not talking to another living soul (not in an extended way, anyway). But over time I’ve discovered that avoidance is an awfully big tent. Sure, I could enjoy doing things on my own but at the root of it was a sense that when I was with someone, I’d need to slip into my entertainer togs. I had the always-ready quip cape, the snarky-comment hot pants, the naughty-zinger zoot suit. My closet was full of obfuscation outfits in order to avoid another person finding me fundamentally lacking. It was exhausting, these quick-change expectations I had for myself. So I avoided as many of those situations as I could, which is why folks are often confused about how it was that I worked in an industry that required me to be social all. the. time. On the most simplistic level, somehow music and its makers were magical enough to override my discomfort. Until they didn’t anymore.

I’m not saying that when my separation and subsequent divorce came in 2007, that the age of inner exploration through solitude was upon me. I still knocked around in the avoidance tent almost exclusively until one of the supporting poles fell down, smacked me in the head, and had me seeing stars, or rather seeing my future and it wasn’t one I particularly liked, stuck in a place of making do, looking for someone to fill me because I didn’t know how to fill myself. I really did not want to do the work. I really wanted someone to give me the joy I hadn’t had in the past years: physically and emotionally. Why couldn’t I just have that? Because it wasn’t available, and boy did I try to find it. Slowly the solitude moved in. Scared the shit out of me. There’s more to the story of course, but for today, that’s as far as I’m going. I’m thinking many (most?) of you reading along (and I’m so grateful for that) have swirled and swung inside the confusion of being human in a time of life when stuff does not seem to make sense and the way forward feels maddeningly unknown. You have (or are) hopefully close to the place you want to be in your big tent life.

Currently, if choosing joy is what I’m moving with&toward, then I have to acknowledge the only way I’m finding that is because of all the complicated, hard, grief-tinged moments that have come from continuing to tip myself into a solitude where I’m listening to what’s inside of me. Like a cold polar plunge, I may avoid it but if I can remember that there is an awakeness on the other side, well, that helps.