Me, myself, and I
A young writer finds herself alone, with plenty of time to read books about ... being alone

By Rachel Brahinsky

THIS PAST WINTER I made up my mind to rid myself of photographs of the past seven years: images of mountain hikes, camping trips, and quite a few of people drinking beer. I packed them all into a sturdy brown box and mailed them to my parents' home in New Jersey, where they would be stashed away in a cold basement until I could again face them: memories of a failed relationship.

Then the package, which was possibly carelessly labeled, never arrived. And after several months of conversations with postal workers – all of which led me to believe there was basically nothing to be done – I gave up. Those images were gone.

When I mailed the box, I had just begun living alone for the first time in my life and was daily learning the difference between loneliness and solitude. Losing those memories, or at least the paper references to them, added a layer of confusion and isolation to this time of my life.

I wasn't only alone now; perhaps I had always been so.

Times of transition seem to bring insights that feel huge and important and unique when they come, even if they are the same timeless revelations that strike most people at some point. For me, losing a partner brought on a yearlong exploration of what it meant to be alone in the world – with or without a lover.

What got me there was typical enough, and yet it was my own experience. After nearly seven years of quasi-marriage, B. and I decided to call it quits in the midst of the largest antiwar march the world has ever seen. There we were, sitting in Civic Center Plaza, ripping ourselves from each other, while thousands walked past with brightly colored signs calling for "peace, love, and understanding."

He stormed off, angry and despondent, into the crowd, while I sat on the curb developing a small ulcer as I watched young beautiful mothers pass by, pushing babies in strollers decorated with flowers and antiwar slogans. Within a few weeks I was packing boxes (including one with old photographs) and leaving.

Now, without those pictures, the years fade into a blur of memory, and the sense of isolation – from the past, from other people, even from myself – can have just a slightly sharper edge.

At least one other person understands where my mind has been: Jonathan Franzen, author of National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections and of a collection of essays called How to Be Alone, which came out in paperback last year. In the essays, Franzen explores notions of solitude, self-sufficiency, and exclusion. One of the best pieces in the collection is about life in the Chicago Post Office, circa 1994. I read it just after first realizing my package was likely gone forever, and I guess I found it soothing to learn how common it is for the postal service to screw up.

In Chicago, Franzen chronicles how mail suddenly stopped showing up at certain houses, and then would arrive sporadically, and often at the wrong address. Utilities were shut off for nonpayment, subscriptions canceled because the bills were never delivered. Through Franzen's eyes we see the postal service as a wretched, molasses-slow bureaucracy that seems shockingly unconcerned with getting mail to its intended destination. Postal workers were known to hoard stockpiles of mail so they could avoid delivering it; at one point a pile of mail was discovered in a walkway underneath a railroad bridge – burning. And the higher-ups largely didn't care, or didn't care to know. Turns out it's something of a miracle our letters ever arrive.

Without overtly saying so, Franzen shows we are far more isolated than we think we are. We write an urgent missive, we send a birthday card and try to connect – and perhaps it gets through, but maybe it goes nowhere. Perhaps it's burning, along with my photographs, in an alley in Chicago.

• • •

Not long ago I was called in for jury duty on a summery afternoon. I headed over to the courthouse, for what would seem like a quintessentially shared moment – joining my community in the public judging of another based on rules of law that presumably are meant to band us together in common understanding of right and wrong.

Yet, sitting in the waiting room, few of us spoke to each other. I watched as one man, a slim, middle-aged guy with a blond mustache, wolfed down a cheese sandwich, occasionally glancing around. At one point he jumped up to indulge in a second can of soda; as he cracked open the can and belched, he glanced shiftily, perhaps embarrassed, around the room.

So I sat, with the belching guy and all the rest, and waited to see if I'd make the jury cut – dependent on the assessment of a judge and two difficult attorneys whom I did not trust.

Frustrated, I opened up Franzen's book to an essay called "Books in Bed."

"The truth, of course, may be," he writes, "that I'm no larger than the next man. But who wants to know a truth like this?"

He's exploring the world of how-to sex books and how foreign the act of sex becomes in its explicated sameness. If all you have to do to have great sex is follow directions, all of the fun of discovery, the rapture of sexual revelation, is gone, and with it at least part of our motivation to try.

So nominally, the essay is on books, but its point is about connection and distance between people. Sex, after all, is largely about connecting, yet sometimes it can make people feel the gap between them is too large for any bridge. How that happens is a muddy mix of judging (each other and ourselves), acting (perhaps like the sort of person we wish we were), and experimenting (with our emotional boundaries and skill).

What Franzen concludes here, or rather defends, is the right to go through the whole mess for himself, the right to make mistakes, or have successes, of his own discovery. As he puts it:

There's something profoundly boring about the vision that is promulgated, if only as an ideal, by today's experts: a long life of vigorous, nonstop, "fulfilling" sex, and the identical story in every household. Although it pains me to remember how innocent I was in my early twenties, I have no desire to rewrite my life. To do so would eliminate those moments of discovery when whole vistas of experience opened out of nowhere, moments when I thought, So this is what it's like. Just as every generation needs to feel that it has invented sex – "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)" was Philip Larkin's imperfectly ironic lament – we all deserve our own dry spells and our own revelations. They're what make our lives good stories.

• • •

This winter, while relearning about singleness, I came across two recent books that try to address the lives of people, like me, who find themselves hovering somewhere around the age of 30 with no marriage or children on the horizon. Both books were written by San Francisco writers as countercultural manifestos for new ways of being in relationships with people. Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment, by Ethan Watters, and Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics, by Sasha Cagen, try to explain how people are living happily single far into their adult years and how in doing this they're changing the definitions of adult life.

Instead of angling for the Ozzie and Harriet sort of middle-class married existence America used to demand, my generation has grown up with a profound distrust of institutions, including a caginess about marriage, and has sought other ways to find meaning. Many of us have invested in relationships that aren't necessarily headed toward marriage: networks of close friends who serve as our families. Cagen and Watters (who, I should say, once was a teacher of mine) both argue in different ways that it's a good thing, and that if we ever do decide to "settle down," we are by then fuller people, with lives and interests that richly intersect. I was fascinated by the ideas in both books, and there was a part of me that was comforted by the message that in a sense I had joined my generation by becoming single.

Simultaneously, I hated them. I've never been a joiner. In the past it's taken me years sometimes to acknowledge I'm part of something larger than myself, even if it's been obvious to others all along. I was never one for having "school spirit" in high school, and while it was consoling to band together with other outcasts who felt the same, I remember we'd look at each other somewhat askance, as if to say, "I know what's wrong with me, but what's wrong with you?"

For years I had a very tight circle of close friends, and once I found B., we wrapped ourselves up in a cocoon of coupledom that shut out many others. As a pair we were up against the world: often judging it together (which made us feel bigger) and self-righteously hiding ourselves (and our afflictions) away from it. I lost two close friendships partly because of it, but I didn't accept that was a reason why at the time.

In a sense that's part of why our breaking up during the peace march held such irony for me: we split in the midst of a mass of people we were connected to but from whom we had partly isolated ourselves. Yet it was that crowd, for each of us in different ways, that took care of us all afternoon as we began to nurse our wounds.

These days it's easier for me to admit to belonging, and I agree there's tremendous value in having a large community of somewhat like-minded people. I don't know that I have an "urban tribe" in the sense Watters defines it, or that I even fully believe he's describing a real phenomenon when he says our generation has replaced the nuclear family with friendship groups in our early adult years. (He admits at the end of the book there's a chance his sociological discovery could simply be his way of explaining why he drifted single all the way into his late 30s. Also, I can't toss off this nagging sense that people always have had these networks, and that outcasts – queers especially – have had "tribes" at the centers of their social worlds for decades at least.)

But I admit I do have a growing feeling of connection to a web of people these days, and it turns out that's often what makes me feel I have a home.

• • •

My favorite chapter in Urban Tribes comes fairly late in the book and isn't about the tribe phenomenon as much as it's about men (primarily, I think, straight men) and why it's hard for so many of them to commit to a single relationship. Women, Watters says, usually have good solid reasons for leaving relationships, "whether it was an emotional disconnect or a lack of long-term compatibility."

Men, Watters found, have urges to leave simply for the sake of the leaving. They're consumed by "some vague sense that they needed their 'freedom,' which was often code for their desire to pursue some fantasy of a perfect mate ... or to sleep with many imperfect ones. Sometimes men didn't even know why they wanted out."

My own relationship to relationships has its complex roots somewhere back in elementary school. I grew up in one of the "odd" families in a painfully small town. I was the one who brought tofu sandwiches for lunch when everyone else ate bologna. My mom made clay pots and my dad was a folksinger, but we lived in a community dominated by nice, "normal" suburban types. As a young kid I was the subject of the school-yard teasing for a few years, which is one of those experiences that persists as a feeling long after the rational mind has made its peace and moved on.

That feeling has made the task of joining groups and sticking with relationships just a bit more of a tangle for me. Sometimes I keep friends and lovers for too long, because my little-girl voice tells me there may not be another; at other times I've stayed distant and cut off, perhaps because the fear of rejection has trained me to protect my heart. At those moments I can better understand the men in my life who have fled simply to flee, who prize their aloneness almost for its own sake, or as Watters says, for reasons they can never articulate or explain. It's almost as if there's a ghost of commitment that chases them and appears each time someone gets a little too close.

But there are so many ways we keep ourselves distant that aren't just about whether we can commit to a mate. I remember my friend K.'s behavior at a difficult family dinner not long ago. His parents are divorced and have been for years, but both sides of the family were at the meal, which was a birthday party for his younger brother. I hadn't seen him in a long time and wanted to catch up. But he picked up the new camcorder someone had just purchased and spent the night behind the lens – capturing us rather than being with us.

It was his way of staying 10 feet back in emotional terms, which struck me as so familiar a behavior that the evening has stayed crisp in my memory because of it. As a writer this is how I often live. For most of my day, I am out to get a story, which is a unique and often strange way to interact with the world. It's a way of life that disconcertingly cuts me off from people – even my closest friends, at times – in my own mind. It makes me feel alone, like an outsider watching the show of the rest of the world.

• • •

I fell asleep the other night reading another of Franzen's essays, this one on his experience of being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club and then being systematically tortured by cameramen who needed him to fake wistfulness as he stood in front of his childhood home, where he had hoped never to be again after his parents' deaths. And there's this painful memory that seizes him, of his mother's refrigerator, as she's dying, where Franzen finds she's saved a dish containing a single bite of canned peas. She had tried to force her failing self to at least eat canned peas; in the end she couldn't do it, but she still had the wherewithal to be frugal and avoid wasting food. He's torn apart at the discovery.

After reading the story I drifted into an uneasy dreamland that culminated with a now-fuzzy scene: I'm with my family in a war zone that might be somewhere in Afghanistan. A band of men wearing black ski hats overtakes us and winds up abducting my mother, carrying her off in a horrible way. In the dream she looks older than she is, and weak, which she is not. I scream shrill achy screams, but there's nothing to be done. I look for my father and he's gone too. I ride off sitting on the back of a large flatbed truck with my brother as if to our deaths.

I woke up then; it was 4 a.m. – my reading light was on, and the book was wedged uncomfortably under my left hip. At the dream's heart is (obviously) fear of abandonment. But there's something else that struck me, and I think it's the realization that while I am an adult, the prospect of losing my parents and being fully alone in the world hasn't lost its sting.

The first Sunday morning that I woke up in my new apartment, a small space of my own on the southwestern edge of the Mission District, I felt alive in a new way. There was nobody to consult with over what to make for breakfast, and nobody to share the New York Times with. This could have made me sad, but it didn't. I enjoyed the freedom, though uncertainly at first.

I puttered around and made myself brunch and sat out front under the blooming bougainvillea with a strong cup of Earl Grey and took in the beautiful morning air around me (it was October in San Francisco, so the sky was a clear and perfect soft blue, and the sun filtered lightly through the bright pink blossoms around the porch).

There was nobody there for me to say, "Isn't this great?" to – and I had that strange sensation that maybe my life wasn't happening to me because I wouldn't be able to prove it to anybody else. (Franzen calls it the "deeply weird experience of seeing yourself seeing yourself.") I had an urge to photograph myself, having a beautiful Sunday morning in the sun, with the flowers and the Times and the tea, so I could share it later on.

To prove to myself that I exist, I suppose, by interacting with the world.

It's not that I hadn't spent time alone before. But it's one thing to take space from a partner, or to carve out an afternoon of solitude in a bustling home filled with housemates and their dramas, and quite another to be alone at night, in the morning, and again alone the next day. This was my own space, and I had moved here knowing it would be good for me to have the room to find out again who I was, without the influences of a partner with different, and sometimes conflicting, needs.

So far, the experiment seems to be working. I still struggle with the sensation that someone else has to verify my existence for it to matter, but the other impulse, the sense that being in charge of my self in every way creates a more fabulous and worthy existence, has grown stronger and more fitting. I have plenty of moments when I turn to other people, or to my vices (chocolate comes to mind), to prop me up – but there are many (much longer) moments in between when I take a walk alone, read more than I used to, and just enjoy the world from my own vantage point, without needing affirmation from anyone or anything.

That sort of attitude is the theme of Cagen's Quirkyalone. I don't absolutely love the way the book is put together, but when I first read it, I immediately recognized the parts of myself that I like the best: my stronger, surer side, the part of me that feels the most adult. The idea she's putting out there is truly important: that we shouldn't settle for coupleness for its sake, and that being alone can and should be enjoyed and respected. She's not arguing for a land of misanthropes but for a world of whole people, who can have creative, interesting lives and who can be happy, whether or not they have a life partner.

It's also not an argument against having a community. She and Watters push the idea that the communities we form as strong individuals are essential and precious networks as fundamental today as the nuclear family has been, and still is for some people. I like that.

Ultimately it seems to me that we're fairly doomed as a species if we don't recognize that we have to have clear strong selves that don't fall apart when we aren't hitched. As much as community is essential (and I do believe this, and I don't think it's contradictory to value independence and community, both) – at the end of the day we only have ourselves.

Franzen puts it in a way that gives me chills of recognition. At the end of an essay on a socialist protest of George W. Bush's inauguration fete, he takes the reader home with him through rainy New York City streets: "You may still be one version of yourself, the version from the bus, the younger and redder version, as long as you're waiting for the subway and riding home. But then you peel off the thermal layers, still damp, of the long day's costume, and you see a wholly different kind of costume hanging in your closet; and in the shower you're naked and alone."

Postscript Just days before this story went to the press, my box of photographs surfaced in upstate New York after six months submerged at a postal reclamation center. I had convinced myself it was for the best that the box was gone; I saw no other option, emotionally. And I find it hard, once I've moved on from something or someone, to pry back the curtain and take a second look. But I'm getting ready to try: I think sorting through the photos will help me move on from B. with more clarity and might resolve some of the blurry questions that remain about the past. So now I'm waiting again for my box to arrive. It's been shipped off to my address, through the U.S. mail.

Rachel Brahinsky is a reporter for the Bay Guardian.

How to Be Alone: Essays

By Jonathan Franzen. Picador USA, 288 pages, $14 (paper).

Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment

By Ethan Watters. Bloomsbury, 272 pages, $14.95 (paper).

Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics

By Sasha Cagen. HarperSanFrancisco, 176 pages, $19.95.