22

DANCING ON MY OWN

I know it’s hard to see right now, but life will be easier again. There will be things to look forward to and joy to be found. You will travel again and see new places, watch spectacular sunsets, drink a glass of wine in a piazza, and soak up the local atmosphere. You will enjoy the sun on your skin and feel that life-giving energy. You will have vitality, and your warmth and fun and vibrancy will return. You will laugh until your sides hurt and you’re gasping for breath. You will have amazing sex and be touched and held. You will feel the love of your friends in equilibrium, without neediness or expectation. You will run again and box and enjoy exercising. Your appetite will return and food will be your friend. Sleep will be a welcome embrace, not something to fear. Your home will feel like a sanctuary again. Watching the Hawks will be a joy. Reading a book will be something you can do without effort. And you’ll be able to veg out in front of the TV and watch movies without your mind racing. Work will be rewarding and collegiate and challenging in ways you will enjoy. There will be new opportunities and possibilities you cannot yet even imagine. I know you can’t see it now, darling, but there is a future. It’s not too late. This is just your tired mind playing tricks on you. Try to hang on. We will get past this, I promise.

13/07/15

A year after I wrote this journal entry I sat in an Italian piazza, drinking a glass of Sangiovese and feeling the life-giving energy of the Tuscan sun warming my skin.

I’d written those words when I was struggling to make it through each hour. Twelve months later, living was again an experience to savour, not a torment to endure. I had just taken voluntary redundancy from The Age after more than a decade on staff. It was a tough decision based not on my health but on the bleak future facing media companies all around the world as an industry struggling to sustain itself faced savage cuts and rapid change. I was sad to leave, but had no regrets about my decision to move on. I was excited about the future and all its possibilities. Yet I wasn’t quite ready to start the next chapter of my career. It had been a pretty brutal couple of years, and although I was feeling stronger and infinitely more hopeful, I needed some space to regroup.

The holiday was, in part, a birthday gift to myself for my fortieth, which I’d celebrated with a huge party in Melbourne with Mum and my friends a few months earlier. Then, as winter cranked up in Australia, I headed home to Edinburgh for a few weeks and on to Italy for a month. My entire Italian trip, barring a few days when Mum would join me in Venice, would be a solo adventure. It was the first time since I was a 20-something backpacker that I’d spent an extended period travelling alone. I flew into Florence and then travelled through the towns and villages of Tuscany, and on to the coastal majesty of the Cinque Terre, before visiting Verona and finishing in Venice.

Having lived alone for years, I knew how to enjoy my own company, but I wasn’t prepared for the challenge that this much of my own company would bring. The travelling itself wasn’t difficult. I loved the independence, was comfortable finding my way around, and wasn’t afraid to ask for directions when I was lost — which, given my woeful navigational skills, was often. I could muddle through with my handful of Italian phrases, and I felt confident in my ability to find company when I wanted it. The biggest hurdle was the alone time — the endless space to think and think and think, and then think some more. When you’re taking in the sights with no one to share them with, it can make you occasionally forget you’re alone. You see something you simply must remark on and before you know it you’ve blurted out, ‘He looks like an Italian Billy Connolly’ or ‘Holy cow, I can see that lady’s arse cheeks’, while chuckling maniacally to yourself.

Not having my friends around to defuse some of the more toxic thoughts was also difficult. Those endless ‘what if’ anxiety loops were a little harder to break. In the first few days there was a constant running commentary, bombarding me at a million miles an hour with unhelpful and often wildly inaccurate information. It was like listening to Channel Seven’s Brian Taylor call a footy match but with less ‘WOWEE, how about that foot candy!’ and more, ‘I am definitely lost. I will never find the hotel again. Rabid Italian dogs will pick over my bones as I die here in the street.’

Back home, when I was able to verbalise some of those thoughts and get the benefit of my support crew’s wisdom (‘Seriously, Starkers, you don’t have a tumour, you just had a big lunch’), I felt lighter. The chatter was easier to tune out. In Italy, I was on my own. Just me and my thoughts. My many, many thoughts. In some ways it was freeing, and allowed me to know myself in a different context, without the reflective gaze of familiar faces and surroundings. But it also meant that there was nobody to steady me when I walked down a cobbled Tuscan laneway, having a panic attack so fierce it felt like vertigo, as if the sheer force of it could knock me off my feet.

Grappling with the challenges, I messaged my friend Kath, who had spent a long time travelling overseas, to ask if she found solo adventures tricky. Her response motivated me:

I did, but I also found it very liberating. Relying on only myself for making myself feel good is a great skill to have. I worked out what I needed in my life to make me happy and decided to just do that instead of my perception of what other people thought I should do. I also learnt to think only good things about other people and I assumed that they were thinking the same about me. I’ve lost that a little bit now and still doubt myself, but travelling solo made all that go away. I was in control of me.

I followed her advice, tapped into my play nature, and began to discover what I liked. Unlike a group holiday — when so often choices are made by committee — I could afford to be entirely selfish. When there is nobody with you, it allows you to focus on what you want — not what you think you should want or what other people might enjoy, but just your own desires. Once you figure that out, you then need the courage to follow through, without apology or guilt. I opened up that playful, childish part of me and learned that some of the things that make me the happiest aren’t always valued in our frenetic modern world, but are vital to my sense of self and wellbeing. I love watching the world go by, listening to the sound of rain on the roof, not rushing, sleeping in, or reading a book for hours on end. I also really like cheese, soft lighting, never having to share my dessert, and binge-watching low-rent reality TV shows.

I stopped scrambling out of bed at the crack of dawn every morning to tick off the sights like the other tourists, and instead stayed under the sheets, read a book, and ate croissants as the sun streamed in the window. I listened to the sounds of horses clip-clopping past and a pianist playing a Baroque concerto under the archway below. I started to notice the richness of life, and realised it comes in the details. It does not come, as Hollywood would have us believe, in the happy-ever-after but in the happy-in-between. It’s in the finest points, the simplest pleasures, that there is peace. The first bite of a perfectly baked lasagne. The afternoon sun warming anxious muscles. A sky so blue and vast it feels painted on. If this was mindfulness, then for a few moments each day I was nailing it.

Alone, I was more attuned to the world around me, noticing things I might have missed had I been lost in conversation with a travel companion. There was the little blonde girl, arms outstretched, trying to catch the cool spray from the misting fans outside a wine bar. Another girl chasing bubbles, calling out, ‘bubbles, bubbles, bubbles’ until she collapsed on the cobblestones laughing. Boys running full steam at a flock of pigeons across an empty courtyard. In a piazza filled with cafés, I watched an army of waiters and shopkeepers assemble with military efficiency to move their tables, chairs, and trinkets undercover at the first rumblings of a thunderstorm. When the rain came down, they sang out to one another across the square like a family of birds in a call-and-response melody. I marvelled as team after team of groups dressed in white ran feverishly past my sidewalk café, snapping pictures en masse, in something called ‘The Selfie Run’. I googled what this was but couldn’t understand the Italian website, so just presumed it marked the end of civilisation as we know it. I also developed a newfound ability to start a conversation with strangers out of absolutely nowhere. Top tip: children, dogs, maps, or interesting-looking food are all easy segues into small talk with total randoms (‘Oh, I see you’re having the wild boar, how adventurous,’ and so on).

I found it freeing that I could choose when I had company and when I didn’t. And most of the time I chose solitude. But despite being content with this choice, I often weathered the anguished looks of strangers as I dined alone. To some of my fellow travellers, a 40-year-old women eating pasta on her own in an Italian beauty spot represented a glimpse into an existence we have long been taught to fear: one that relies only on the inner self for validation and comfort. A life untethered — liberating in ways, but without the anchor of another to reflect our worth.

Several times I approached restaurants and asked for a table for one, only to find myself ushered into a poky corner out the back or by the bathroom door. When I asked why I couldn’t have the vacant table closest to the ocean, or the one with the view of the rolling Tuscan hills, the wait staff would tell me it was reserved. Five minutes later and a couple with no reservation was ushered to the same table. It felt as if my aloneness was not only being viewed as abnormal, it was being actively discouraged.

Solitude is a terrifying prospect for so many of us because we’re told that it’s not the natural order of things. Our cultural markers repeatedly remind us that coupledom is the ultimate fairytale ending. Whether it’s through media, advertising, or government policy, women are judged particularly harshly for being without a partner or child — described as ‘spinsters’, ‘unlucky in love’ or, as in the case of former prime minister Julia Gillard, ‘deliberately barren’. An entire beauty and magazine industry is predicated on teaching girls that their most pressing life priority is to ensure they don’t die alone. Even the notion of ‘failed’ marriages suggests that coupledom equals success, while being unpartnered is a sad consolation prize. 

An extended period of single life is like being among the long-term unemployed — the longer you’re out of the game, the harder it is to return to the workforce. With technology adding to the pressure, modern dating is a non-stop rollercoaster ride of hope and expectation played out at breakneck speed. There’s always that heady buzz of anticipation — like unwrapping a Christmas present — as you imagine whether this will be the person who makes your heart dance. Then, the crushing low of realising that although the gift is wrapped in shiny paper, the box inside is empty. For a long time after the eight-year relationship that brought me from Scotland to Australia ended in an excoriating storm of grief and bewilderment, I wasn’t looking to ‘find someone’. It took all my will to find a way back to myself. Then, when I was capable of sharing the rebuilt me with the world, I discovered that meeting a man to spend my life with was a more complex matter than just being ready. It’s a labyrinthine equation of circumstance, timing, emotional maturity, sexual chemistry, vulnerability, and trust, and a thousand other variables so that at times it feels like buying a ticket for a cosmic lottery. No app or ‘online compatibility matching system’ can manufacture the inexplicable spark that ignites a great love.

A few times I thought I’d come close to finding it. After my book came out, I fell for a man who seemed to adore me. He was charming and attentive and sexy, with a smile that made my head sway and my insides somersault. He told me I deserved everything. It was a painful unravelling to realise he couldn’t — or didn’t want to — be the one to deliver it. After that, I met someone who was willing and able to give me everything. It was refreshing and lovely, and I wished I could dive in and meet his affection with equal enthusiasm. But that thing — a spark, an energy, some sort of unspoken kismet that twists you inside out — wasn’t to be.

‘Oh, but perhaps you’re too picky,’ I’ve been told, by well-meaning purveyors of unsolicited advice on the single experience. Yet I know what it feels like to be trapped in a union when one party isn’t fully there. It’s an aching emptiness that feels like the slow death of your soul. I won’t do that again. I remain open to love, but for the past few years I’ve actively taken myself out of the dating game. My full-time commitment has been reconnecting with the parts of me I’d neglected. When you’re constantly searching, it takes you away from yourself, and from all the people who make your life sing. So I stopped chasing.

Since I gave up the hunt, I’ve enjoyed single life so much more. I love my freedom and independence, and I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve achieved on my own. My apartment is a self-made sanctuary. I even have a recurring nightmare in which I can’t breathe because a man moves in, takes my artwork off the walls, and shifts my furniture around before telling me he’s allergic to cats and he’s serving Hamish an eviction notice.

But if I was to listen to the messages society sends me as a 40-something woman, I should be unfulfilled. My life is an oddity; an existence to be pitied, not celebrated. Solo life is an aberration. It’s a narrative that flies in the face of reality. There are more single-person households than at any point in our history. We prop up the economy, and yet every year at Budget time our government acts as if we don’t exist. The norm may be the ‘working family’, but things are changing. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, lone-person households are projected to show the biggest percentage increase over the next 25 years. That means the number of people living alone will rise by up to 65 per cent, from 2.1 million households in 2011 to 3.4 million in 2036. We’re going to have to redefine our view of solo life if this trend continues. A community built with people who can’t stand or have never experienced their own company is not a healthy one. And yet, in an age when we’re constantly connected, spending time alone has become a foreign state of mind. It’s a perverse irony that the selfie is ubiquitous at a time when being in touch with our true self is a skill many simply don’t possess.

For younger generations — who have never known a world before smartphones and social media — true aloneness is such an alien concept that some will do anything to avoid it. In one recent study from the University of Virginia, two-thirds of college students chose to administer themselves electric shocks rather than be left in an empty room with nothing but their own thoughts for just six to 15 minutes. It seems anything, even physical pain, is better than nothing.

There is a global push to destigmatise solitude, and a raft of research which suggests that, rather than run from it, we should actively seek it out. Embracing alone-time can improve mood, creativity, and memory, and lower stress and agitation. A study from the University of Illinois found that teenagers who spent between 25 and 45 per cent of their non-classroom time alone were academically more successful and less depressed than their socially active classmates. Research out of Harvard has found that people who perform tasks alone retain memories better than those who work in pairs.

I spoke via email with Sara Maitland, author of How to Be Alone, who lives in a home she built on a remote moor in south-west Scotland — where there is no mobile phone coverage and the nearest supermarket is 30 kilometres away. I imagined her living there in the wilds, like a character in a moody Nordic crime drama, and found the idea both terrifying and somewhat appealing. Maitland said that she did not seek solitude, ‘it sought me’ following the breakdown of her marriage. After a year of living alone in a small country village, she realised she had become ‘phenomenally happy’, not because she was glad to be separated from her husband but because it allowed her to become more attuned to nature, and to foster creativity, deep self-knowledge, and a profound connection to her own needs. She told me that solitude is a description of fact, while loneliness is an emotional response to it, and the expectation that loneliness accompanies single life is no more than a cultural assumption. ‘We live in a culture that tells young people that being single is a disaster. They were not brought up with any training in being alone and enjoying being alone. Like social skills, solitude needs practice,’ she said. ‘Look at the language we use. “Loner” used to mean “heroic adventurer” — the Lone Ranger, for instance. Now it means “dangerous weirdo” and very probably “sexual predator” … Office culture favours the team and the open-plan office. Not having a partner is seen as a tragedy.’

Maitland believes our culture places too much emphasis on couples and the family, and would like to see single life afforded more respect, to help normalise solitude for young people. ‘We could start by never using isolation as a punishment for children. It should be a reward. Not “Go to your room” but “You’ve been so helpful this morning, would you like some time of your own now?” But equally, by not giving them a mobile phone too early or a computer in their room, we could encourage them to get outside alone.’

I agree that practising solitude is a healthy pursuit, but we can’t disregard the very real sense of loneliness many people feel in a fast-paced society that is big on connectivity yet often pulls up short on human connection. A 2016 Lifeline survey found about 60 per cent of the 3,100 respondents said they ‘often felt lonely’ and 83 per cent felt loneliness was increasing in society, with the suicide prevention charity’s chief executive saying their helpline received more calls about social isolation and loneliness than they did about mental-health issues. The health risks of loneliness include increased chances of heart disease, stroke, and early death, particularly when that isolation has not been a choice. We need those intimate connections to thrive. I’m acutely aware that my network of close friends and family has insulated me from the loneliness that pervades everyday life for many people in this age of anxiety.

Dr Stephanie Dowrick, author of Intimacy and Solitude — a book that really helped me embrace that sacred solo space — told me that when aloneness is involuntary, whether through rejection or divorce or bereavement, people can feel shame and powerlessness. ‘It’s that sense that “everybody else has got someone to love them and I don’t”. In those moments, we forget that almost everybody has had some experiences of not being chosen. Tiny children feel it, very elderly people feel it, and we have to go through many processes as we mature of really reconciling our relationship with ourselves so that when we are with other people we’re not overly needy.’

The key, it would seem, is how we view being alone, and the sense we can make of it. Being unpartnered does not necessarily mean being isolated. The loneliest I’ve ever felt was in a long-term relationship that had become loveless and dysfunctional. I was so disconnected from myself I’d forgotten who I was. Dowrick said, ‘I think if people understand aloneness and solitude with a little bit more subtlety, and if they see that they have more power than they may know about how they may experience these times, then even aloneness can be a useful catalyst and times of solitude can be utterly nourishing.’

This insight helped me feel less self-conscious when I noticed the stares of fellow diners on my travels in Italy. In the scheme of things, their opinion of me was of as much consequence to me as mine was to them. And what do we ever really know about the strangers we briefly cross paths with while holidaying? We get only glimpses of their lives — stolen snippets of their joy, their frustration, their ridiculousness. And we judge, painting a picture of their lives on a canvas that can’t be stretched past that moment. No future, no past, just the terse words they exchanged with their child or the kindness they offered a street beggar. Sinner or saint, the sum of their humanity fossilised in the second we encounter them.

So I tried to judge people less, and in turn accepted, with compassion and an open heart, the discomfort that my table for one might cause strangers. But I also became profoundly aware that having a partner does not in itself make that discomfort disappear. Just as I found that my problems did not vanish by transporting them to a beautiful city on the other side of the world, I noticed that for many partnered people, holidays can amplify the distance in a relationship. In Lucca, an achingly beautiful walled Tuscan city, I wandered through a rabbit warren of narrow cobbled streets and occasionally found myself stumbling into someone else’s personal hell. For every couple kissing on a tandem bike at sunset, there was another wondering why they ever thought the person standing next to them was a suitable life partner. One morning, strolling along Via Fillungo — one of Lucca’s liveliest pedestrianised thoroughfares — I noticed that the Australian couple walking next to me were having a bad day:

Him: Well, it’s your bloody fault. We could have been out walking yesterday, but you were bloody sick in bed all day.

Her: You could have gone out walking without me. Nothing to stop you going out on your own.

Him: You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t bloody get it. This was meant to be a holiday where we spent time together.

Her: Can you slow down? My feet are hurting in these sandals.

Him: FUCKEN HELL! First I’m too slow, now I’m too fast. I can’t fucken win.

I left them there as we walked past the stunning Basilica di San Frediano, its Romanesque beauty only serving as cruel counterpoint to their discomfort. Who knows what happened next? But it was a reminder to me — the solo traveller, who sometimes felt that she must be crazy to still be anxious among all the splendour — to be kinder to myself and accept that being alone can sometimes be a blessing.

I felt the strength of my solitude most keenly during a hike between Levanto and Monterosso — two beach villages separated by the clifftops of the Cinque Terre. The guidebooks said it was a 7.12-kilometre track. That didn’t seem like much from the outset — I used to walk that far from my apartment to work some mornings. But this was mostly uphill, through steep, rocky terrain. It would take me up to three hours. At first I imagined it as a great odyssey of self-discovery, like that undertaken by author Cheryl Strayed in Wild, where she frees herself from grief and self-medication by trekking through the wilderness to find wholeness and a brand-new life. This would be just the tonic I needed.

Then I realised I was back in the happiness trap. Focused on the endpoint rather than the journey. It was just a walk through the hills. It didn’t need to be life-changing. And also, Cheryl Strayed hoofed it some 1,700 kilometres from the Mojave Desert along the Pacific Crest Trail. I was taking a morning stroll from one Italian beach town to another.

The path started just off the promenade by the water in Levanto. It climbed steeply up too many steps for me to count, and then I was on the trail proper. Almost immediately, the views down to Levanto were breathtaking. As the path got steeper, I realised it wasn’t going to be a stroll. I began to sweat like Pauline Hanson in a Bankstown kebab shop. As I climbed, I became more concerned by my attire. There weren’t many other walkers on the trail, but every 20 minutes or so I’d see a couple pass, and invariably they were dressed as if they meant business — serious hiking boots, khaki shorts, backpacks, and walking poles. Meanwhile, I was wearing my runners, a cotton beach skirt I’d bought in Byron Bay as a backpacker circa 2001, my bikini top, and a fedora.

The climb was hard. It was bloody hard. For more than an hour it was an uphill slog over rocky ground on a dusty track that often disappeared, making it difficult to know which way was forward. I began to question whether I was as fit as I thought I was. But the more I walked, the more determined I became. I was not going back. There was no going back. I just kept breathing, stopping for a rest and some water when I needed to, admiring the views before me. I was struck by how grateful I was for my own company and the rejuvenation that can come from solitude. I stood looking out on to the stillness of the water and breathed deeply into the space and the quiet. It felt as though this hike was a metaphor for the last few years of my life. Or maybe all of my life. Or maybe everyone’s life. You climb and you climb, and it seems never-ending. You struggle to catch your breath, to the point where all you can do to keep going is put one foot in front of the other and remember to breathe in and out. Then, just when you think you can’t keep battling uphill, the path levels out and there is air in your lungs again. You find your feet, you reset; you feel stable, and so proud of yourself for not giving up.

But then, as you are starting to find your equilibrium, a lizard darts out and it scares the shit out of you and you nearly lose your footing and you think, Where the fuck did that lizard come from? You keep going, rattled but undeterred. You get back into a rhythm. But then another, bigger lizard appears out of nowhere and you’re like, ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING LIZARDS! You keep going. Climbing again. You round the corner and the track is blocked by boulders. You worry that perhaps you’re lost. Then, a very subtle signpost appears, a splash of red paint on a small rock, that lets you know you’re on the right path. You reach the summit, and even though you know there will be more pain and more climbing in the future, you’re grateful that your body and your mind are strong enough to have brought you here. The vista opens up before you and it’s beautiful and expansive and worth every drop of sweat and twinge of pain. You run down the hill towards the end of the track, skipping over rocks as if you are jet-propelled, arms outstretched like a bird opening its wings. And in that moment, you are so grateful that despite the climbing and the struggles and the pain and all the fucking lizards, you made it here to see it.