Solitude is Overrated

For an introvert I get oddly wound up about sharing beautiful things with my people. Like this sunrise I caught on the way to my son’s school last Thursday morning. I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get a good picture of it and send it to my partner. The urgency was ridiculous. And, of course, pictures never do anything that gorgeous full justice so I have to add words like, “It’s so pink and soft and ripply. Oh! Now it’s angling up through the whole sky!” I’m like a child who needs a grown up to validate her experience lest she doubt her own eyes.

My late husband, Patrick, used to take pictures of stormy skies — a lifelong habit evidenced by his childhood polaroids all the way through his Instagram account. He loved a good “frog choker” or “trash mover” as he called them (as his father before him called them). Once Patrick, who died from ALS in May 2021, was bed bound and unable to so much as leave a curtain open in his room because the light bothered his eyes and the glare would prevent his eye gaze communication device from working, I would still occasionally get to leave the house. The beautiful things I saw out in the world — like a brewing storm cloud — were a kind of torture.

Do I take a picture and send it to him or is that like bragging about my relative freedom? Patrick was gracious in that regards so it made sense to send him the picture, but then there was a high probability I was just too exhausted to bother or too cranky to feel generous with my time…yet I would still be acutely aware of how he would have given anything to be in the passenger seat trying to get just the right picture with his typically terribly outdated phone. In that moment I’d feel very conscious of the empty car and of all my privileges compared to his and the limitations of my weariness.

I’m well rested now for the most part, and I can leave the house as often as I wish. Rain or shine. Sunrise or sunset. And when I witness something wondrous, I can barely contain the need to share it with my person. I resent and resist just “taking it all in” by myself. Maybe it’s over-compensation for all those storm clouds that were missed, but I really can’t tolerate experiencing beauty in aloneness anymore.