isolation

the tyranny of doing what you love

A picture of a photograph by Keisha Scarville at the ICP

Twice in my life I’ve experienced extreme loneliness. One was after a breakup, which sparked the desire to make more friends. The other was over a two-year period when I first tried writing a novel. What’s bewildering about this experience is that my isolation was entirely self-imposed. Looking back, I feel embarrassed by the choices I made. What was I thinking?

I had just moved back to New York from Cincinnati, expecting to resume the same post-college party lifestyle I had despairingly renounced when I left for the midwest. But many of my college friends had returned to their home states or countries, and the ones who stayed felt somehow more distant. They worked in finance and orbited different social circles. I couldn’t keep track of who was who among the people they talked about. I tried dating and found it opaque and tiresome. Every stranger I sat across from presented a challenge: decipher their actual thoughts and feelings behind the veil of manners. I was starting to write a novel and preferred figuring out how my characters think and feel, the ways in which they conceal themselves.

I was concealing myself, too. Writing a novel requires long hours of deep work over the course of many months. It’s an extremely solitary pursuit, and for me, all-consuming. I have no trouble dedicating my free time to it. I very much relate to this note by

Lillian Wang Selonick

. It’s hard to diversify my attention when I’m working on a book. I developed avoidant attachment, socially. The prospect of attending a coworker’s wedding in New Jersey filled me with dread because it would mean spending an entire weekend away from the book. I preferred dating men who were emotionally distant because they gave me the space to retreat into my writing. For two years, I did the bare minimum to keep up with friends and made zero effort to meet new people.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I was desperately lonely. I had brief bouts of depression that I attributed to my failure to find a partner. But the loneliness ran deeper than that. None of my friends or coworkers had any interest in writing, let alone writing an entire book. It became such a big part of my life, and I couldn’t share it with anyone. Rather than going out and finding community, I viewed social activities as a distraction and my isolation as a necessary sacrifice for the transformation I was sure would come once the book was published.

Most addictions we’re familiar with take on the form of a vice. Gambling, porn, alcohol, social media, video games. But we can also be addicted to things that seem “good” on the surface. Broadly, an addiction is a strong attachment that interferes with your ability to self-regulate. Instead of listening to all your parts and attending to their various needs, you are overindulging one or two needs at the expense of everything else.

Drugs, in all their forms, are the great human replacement. Addiction is a disease of loneliness. Even if we have a lot of great people in our lives, if we get addicted, we will isolate, and we will use that drug to replace human connection.

— Dr. Anna Lembke on Scott Galloway’s podcast

I feel ashamed of how much I neglected relationships and shut myself off from the world back then. I will never return to my hermit era, but even today, when there are too many demands on my attention, I panic and feel the need to withdraw. I want to turn off my phone for a week and just read and write. Nothing is more psychologically rewarding than getting immersed in a good story. It’s particularly comforting given the state of the world and the constant barrage of information from our screens.

This past winter, I tore the skin over my left heel from improperly breaking in a pair of boots, and for two weeks, I paid the price with every step I took. Forced to work from home and abstain from my morning runs, I felt miserable. It was a pesky wound—such a small thing that was causing major disruptions to my life. After a few days, I hit the treadmill, willfully pretending my foot was back to normal. The wound punished my impatience by reopening and bleeding afresh. Like Sisyphus rolling the stone back up the mountain, I had to start the healing process all over again.

I thought about how much it sucks to be an athlete, doing what you love, then, one day, an injury renders you incapable of rotating your arm or taking a jump shot or sprinting down a track. I’m not a workout fanatic, but the fact that I was willing to compromise my recovery by running through the pain revealed to me just how much I relied on that dopamine rush to feel good about myself. Running in the mornings has become such a deeply engrained routine that it feels bad to not do it.

The same is true of writing. The challenge for me isn’t committing to a practice but the opposite—exercising the discipline to not write so that I can hold space for other sources of joy, meaning, and psychological richness. I just returned home from a trip to Thailand where, for ten days, I journaled in a coffee shop once and opened my manuscript zero times. Of course, I felt guilty about it. I was expecting to get much more done. But my failure to write on this trip can also be seen as a success.

The singleminded pursuit of any endeavor, no matter how much it brings us joy or meaning, is a road to loneliness. And that’s not a road I would take again.