Choosing Reflection in Times of Change

Personal Perspective: An empty nest can be a healthy reset.

Time moves slowly in the desert. Since relocating here in September, I wake with the light, like it or not. My closest local friend lives an hour and a half away. My husband and I have each other—thrilling in a second marriage in which we’ve never before lived alone without kids. Still, it’d been 30-plus years since I went days seeing only one other person.

Loneliness is bad for our health. The CDC website lists heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, suicidality, self-harm, dementia, and earlier death as possible outcomes. The AMA identified “loneliness as a public health issue.” Even the surgeon general confirms that the mortality risk is “similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, greater than obesity and physical inactivity.”

Yet there is a both and to this reality. In “Is ‘Busy’ the New Status Symbol,” Molly Rose Teuke cites bestselling author Brené Brown’s concern that busyness is used “as a defense against emotions we might rather not acknowledge or face.” According to Pew Research, “60 percent of some 2,000 Americans believed there are not enough hours in the day to complete their to-do list,” and six of 10 adults felt “too busy to enjoy life.” Hyper-scheduled Americans cannot combat loneliness with frantic activity.

That sure doesn’t mean we don’t try.

As an only child, I grew up with loneliness as a playmate. My parents met many criteria that put people at risk for loneliness, from poverty to older age to physical and mental health issues. My mother’s loneliness was a force in our small apartment: one she and I relied upon my young self to “fix.” I spent hours after school regaling her with stories of my day—some exaggerated or even fabricated to entertain and make her happy. In college, we talked on the phone every day. My mother often referred to me as her “best friend,” and although I now understand the dangers of parentification of children, my mother was, for many years, my best friend too: no one would ever be as endlessly interested in my every thought, activity, or errand.

Still, I took vigorous steps against similarly relying on my kids. Whereas my mother had been stay-at-home, I always worked, even if it was for peanuts in the nonprofit or adjunct-academia sectors; where she had few girlfriends, I maintained a busy social life; while she had only me, I chose to have a bigger family of three children; where she stayed in a platonic, emotionally distant marriage, I left my first marriage and found an intoxicating intellectual and physical passion in my second; while she was an armchair traveler, I breathlessly traversed the world even when it taxed me economically. I made a lifestyle of avoiding the harbingers of my mother’s isolation and—sure enough—for years had loneliness on the ropes.

I also had zero time for self-care, be it meditation, yoga, therapy, or even a nap. I got by on five hours of sleep, rarely said no to professional or social invitations, lived in a bustling city, and was rarely alone. Then, everything changed. With my parents deceased and my youngest child off to college, my husband and I downsized, moving to a small home he has long owned in the California desert, six miles from the closest tiny town (35 miles from a Target!). In the months since our move, loneliness and I have reapproached each other like old enemies who just might, this time, become friends.

Should I be worried about becoming part of the loneliness epidemic? Well, the jury is out, but for the moment, I’m not. Instead, I’m leaning in. For the past quarter century, I needed to clone myself to achieve even half my to-do list; I perpetually promised myself that come X months, life would “calm down,” only to find myself overflowing with obligations once that elusive month arrived. Some of this was necessary as a divorced mom with kids and my mother to support, but chaos also became my antidote to loneliness. Was it any surprise then, when newly meditating on my desert porch, my mind darted like frantic wings batting against a cage? Was it any surprise that when my husband was otherwise occupied, I barely remembered what to do with "alone time?"

Loneliness is, like many things, a slippery slope. True isolation is bad for most people (there are exceptions), but I live with an attentive spouse, visit my kids, spend time with my business partner (also one of my besties), and practice yoga in town. I have friends and a daughter in Los Angeles. I’m hardly in danger of falling into non-contact with the world. What I was in danger of, for years, was falling into non-contact with myself. For now, wrestling with loneliness is a kind of detox from the ways I’ve been running from myself vis-à-vis frantic activity. Finally, I’m forced to sit with the contents of my brain, the vast empty spaces of our land, the vibrantly colored, wide and silent sky.

It took a couple of months, but when meditating, I began to focus on my breath without my brain future spinning, firing into “micromanager” mode, or anxiety opening a wellspring beneath me. In, out: me and my breath, together again, but here at 56 there is no one for whom I must perform. When my husband asks how I’m doing, I am honest: I’m struggling, but I welcome the struggle—the chance to grow inside of it. I knew this would be difficult, and that was part of the appeal.

Maybe that is the crux of things. Loneliness and isolation that are not chosen can be harmful, but sometimes, it is okay to choose hard things for a period, as a reset, a tool for transformation. Sometimes, loneliness is not harmful, but rather unfurling. Sometimes I am a fist, but other, increasing times, I am a flower, finally with the space to expand.

xo -Gina Frangello