The isolation cubicle
When isolation becomes a deprivation of connection
Dearest reader,
Pardon the gap in writing here, it’s for reasons precisely pertaining to what I’ll be discussing here in this post, ones that I know so many of us wrestle with: isolation and protection.
I have this pattern of what I’ll call “spotty connection” where I fade away, out of reach, out of connection with my loved ones and into isolation. It’s one of the protective parts I struggle most to unstick from. And it’s one of the foremost things I support clients to learn to break out of— to reach out from beyond the cubicle of isolation, shame, and protection and to find a tether.
It’s both a young (from childhood) and old (35+ years in the making) response. When I would experience a big feeling as a kid, I learned to run to my room, shut the door, and release it through tears, screams into the pillow, or venting to my non-judgmental stuffed animals. They were much softer than my crass (but beneath it, caring) Brooklyn dad telling me to get over it or that it was tough shit and I needed to grow thicker skin. And it seemed to protect and buffer my mom against her own challenging mental health landscape. In adolescence, I learned to starve my feelings by starving myself and being “good”, pleasant, not too much. If I could just contain the pain internally and not express it outwardly, then I wouldn’t be a burden to my parents or others around me; I wouldn’t be too much.
Enter: Shame and then Depression, the latter of which came online partly as a way to protect myself from my too muchness, to “press” down (depression) the bigness of my emotional world and replace it with, in my case, numbing, dissociation, and isolation. Protect so to not risk further wounds, and to not splatter my emotional waters onto someone else.
The isolation appears the moment the depression does. I contract, fold in on myself, and close off to the world. Beloved friends message and ask what I need, how they can support and show up for me. Over and over again, I say, I don’t know. But what I really mean is, I don’t know if I can trust you to (want to) hold me in this and I don’t want to burden or consume you with my heaviness, so it’s best if I just return to our connection when this has passed, and when I have something to give here. It sometimes doesn’t pass for 2-3 months.
In those months, I will frequently deprive myself of the nourishment which connection can so often provide and I will cut others off from being able to support and buoy me in ways they are genuinely and endearingly offering to.
I am still running off to my room to be alone with my “too muchness”.
Change is hard y’all.
But here I am, reaching out from my isolation cubicle with these words, with letting my friends and my therapist know I want to stay in connection, that I don’t want it to be spotty anymore.
I said to some of my dearest friends just recently, maybe when I am in my hole, you could ask the question:
How here or not here are you?
Last month, there were days I was maybe 25% here, that’s how dissociated I was. This past weekend, I reflected that I was more like 75% here. The person asking the question is either available to be with you at the level of hereness or not hereness, they can support you to shift even 5-10%, or they aren’t available and you can just be right where you are until something shifts.
Sarah Aziza in her breathtaking memoir The Hollow Half writes of her experience of dissociation: “an essential distance persists, wedged between the moment and me. I toggle in and out of myself…”
I invite you to reach out here from behind your cubicle of isolation and leave a comment, send a message, a meme, or a carrier pigeon, with the caveat that in this space, I am not here as a therapist or to offer psychotherapy or clinical interventions.
It’s a practice, a slow unfolding to smooth out the creases of all the places where we can fold in on ourselves. One crease at a time, one percent at a time. And hey, if this desert cactus can manage to form a stunning blossom through all of its spikes, maybe you too, can find something within yourself—beyond the prickly protectors—that wants to unfurl and slowly open out to the world.
My intention is for my work to reach the sensitive souls, the creative and neurodivergent ones, and the dwellers between the worlds. If this is you or you know someone who this might be for, please share and subscribe.
From my more here than not place between the worlds,
Pamela