One of my all-time favorite books is one by Dodie Smith (author of 101 Dalmations) called I Capture the Castle. Smith’s work inspired J.K. Rowling (another favorite writer), & for me the former joins the likes of Frances Hodgson Burnett with The Secret Garden & Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series with the young women protagonists they created. Heroines in these bildungsromans were dreamers & loners who found that time spent in solitude sparked creative energy–whether writing or gardening or following whatever flight of fancy they pursued. These heroines sought beauty in the world & used it to create art, no matter the ugliness of the time or situations that surrounded them. This resonates for me quite acutely now. Social distancing, isolation, & solitude are things that can quite easily to introverts. As a child, I spent a great deal of time on my own. I know there has been recent articles about the incredible resilience of Gen X-ers in the face of this pandemic. One salient article writes:

All of the sudden folks are impressed by our remarkable resilience, our ability to entertain ourselves for hours on end and our willingness to shelter in place without whining. All hail the forgotten generation ― we’re finally getting the recognition that we deserve. Gen X folks can actually thrive on solitude and enjoy their downtime, due to our advanced tolerance for boredom. We spent untold hours alone in our homes after school, fending for ourselves, living off Ding-Dongs and macaroni and cheese, as the first generation of latchkey kids. Social isolation is not only tolerable for us, Gen X requires a regular dose of it to recharge our batteries. So while you might already be flipping out, we are basking in the down time. We once focused all our attention on making mix tapes. Some of our best products took the entire weekend to create.

And, yes, I was that kid. I spent hours on my own, dreaming away as part of a generation raised on The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, & Labyrinth. These weren’t fluffy, light movies, mind you. All of these fantasy films created a dramatic influence on 80s kids. Or, at least, they had a major impact on ME. While I had a stay-at-home mother, I was the youngest of 6 children during a time when my mother was ill (both physically & in terms of overall emotional well-being) so spending a lot of time alone in my own worlds of imagination became normal.

If you’ve been following this blog, then you’ll also recognize the above allusion to The Neverending Story, given its major influence on my childhood imagination with The Nothing & all its scariness. Maybe I was affected so much by these kinds of fantasy films because I’m an empath? I do feel like I am a highly sensitive person (HSP) who easily affected by others’ emotions. As a child, I struggled a lot with feelings because I took on so many others’ energy, especially those others who were bullied or persecuted in some way. To the extent that I would have nightmares–& these nightmares weren’t about unrealistic things. Quite the opposite. My worst nightmares involved scenes of intolerable human cruelty. Scenes of unconscionable violence & terror based on sheer hatred of people based on race most prominently. Slavery. The Holocaust. The Civil Rights Era. The violence scared me because that the hatred that caused it wasn’t imagined or fictitious but rather quite palpably real. So, even now, when faced with so much loss & so much more loss to come, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been triggered, especially for those in urban or rural communities where the marginalized find themselves the most hardest hit by this pandemic.

Even at work, I’m now hearing incredibly sad accounts of human loss that is not even making it on to the news. Nursing homes that have 11 deaths in one night, or a northern town in Colorado that’s been so ravaged it’s been declared a disaster area, with the National Guard planning to come in to establish make-shift hospital tents where they can. Or a student nurse who physically tries to block her coworker so she will stay at the hospital to be intubated, only to have her die hours later.

In my small way, I’m trying to do for others as much as I can–whether they ask or not, whether they willingly receive it or not. I know I’m been very blessed to retain a position that allows me to work & earn money from home during a time when so many others are suffering. Sometimes, this all feels so surreal. I remember back to being that carefree girl dreaming, sitting at The Headlands or playing in the woods, imagining mermaids, dragons, & fairies. It seems like lifetimes ago now. Sure, life has hardened me. Losing a parent & your closest sibling to cancer will do that. Having countless near-death situations with a brittle diabetic mother, I have driven to the ER so many times not knowing if my surviving parent would be still alive when I would arrive there. That kind of constant rattling of the bones, that insidiously nagging reminder of mortality, even from as young as I can remember, has made me a more serious person than I think I would have been otherwise.

And as a Libra, finding balance remains a constant tug on my psyche. I’m always trying to seek balance, very rarely ever finding it. Thankfully, escaping into my head & intellectualizing the things around me provides me with temporary bouts of relief. I’ve taken to joining “Mindful Moments,” online sessions a colleague offers for leading us through activities that ground oneself in the present–body scans, meditation, breathing, guided scenarios. I find those times helpful. Yet, I’m often thrown back to those memories of when my dad & brother battled cancer, feeling in a semi-numb state, not really absorbing everything because it’s all so much to take in & register.

Maybe reading some of my old favorites like I Capture the Castle, Like Water for Chocolate, A Room with a View, & Possession will help me find more of that calm.