Are we afraid of intimacy? Are tragedies the new drug of choice?

“P.S. I know you two, and if I’m gone, I know what you could become, because I know who you really are – a junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war,” Mary Watson says in The Final Problem, the finale of the BBC series Sherlock. 

Ben and I watched it last night, shortly before the evacuation orders for the Woolsey Fire had been lifted for the Los Angeles County. 

The fire, that had started on Thursday, November the 8th, had destroyed, over the weekend, over 80,000 acres of land and burned the houses of hundreds in the area between Thousand Oaks, West Hills, Calabasas, and Malibu. The nearby Topanga Canyon had been evacuated, too, and being so close to us we had packed our cars and lived in alert mode since Friday. 

It was scary; several friends of ours had to leave their homes, some of them had lost it, so I was relieved and grateful we were safe. But when the evacuation orders were lifted, a part of me was taken over by a sense of dullness, of emptiness, of discontent. I felt guilty for it, so I didn’t say anything. 

When I was little, I always wanted to have people over for dinner: “Mom, can they eat with us?” I would ask her then and there, in front of my friends, so that she couldn’t say no. She would always reprimand me later, after they left, but I kept at it nonetheless: I invited people over for dinner because I felt uncomfortable with my family. Just the four of us (my mother, my father, my brother, and myself) was not enough — it was difficult for me to deal. It still is, at times.  

For the same reason, weekends were also uncomfortable. In fact, with Saturday approaching, the week-life filled with school, activities, errands, and people outside the family scene paused. The TV palimpsest changed, stores closed, and I was left to the reality of Via Gramsci 17, where I lived at the time. I was left without things to distract me from the intimacy of family.  

I don’t have many memories of my childhood, but a vivid one is that of autumn Sundays playing with my brother in the garage where my father worked wood while listening to the soccer game on the radio. My brother and I would run around, pretend we drove my parents’ burgundy Subaru and chase Chicca, a stray cat I pretended was mine.

Where I am from, autumn is gloomy, humid, and cold. 

We lived in a small flat on the second floor of a three-story building consisting of six apartments. I remember every particular of the structure and of its garden; it was small but very well tended, with a grassy area, gravel, an old birch, and a weeping willow. Every balcony was long and narrow with a kind of thick, dark green curtain that could be drawn to provide privacy from the neighbors. It’s interesting how some details of the past are vivid in my memory, while others I can’t access at all. I remember the park across the street. I remember fogged windows in the kitchen because of the cold weather and mandarin peels drying on every radiator in the house and releasing their wintry essence. I also remember the small TV set in the kitchen, two black and white photographs hanging on the wall that portrayed my mother with our dog, and the white round table that basically occupied the entire kitchen. I remember that we didn’t have much, and yet everything that we needed for a simple, joyful life. But I dreaded the intimate times nonetheless. 

I still dread Sundays.

The story I am telling does have to do with Sherlock, and with the fire that had started on November 8th. 

As I grew older, my discomfort with the intimacy of normality evolved. And as the uneasiness increased, so did the need for stronger drugs to control it. Starving and throwing up had been a very early one that continued throughout my adult life, but when my eating disorder ceased to be enough for me to avoid the unpleasantness of intimacy I began to cut myself in order to feel anything other than what I felt, in order to feel “altered”. Then drugs came, alcohol, sex, danger.  

In August of 2012 I got sober, but “little Alice” who needed to invite people over for dinner had not healed.

I still don’t know why I felt that way. I still don’t know why I feel this way.

As I have extensively wrote in my essays, and therefore many of you know, during my first years of sobriety life wasn’t easy. I struggled to make the ends meet in an expensive city like Los Angeles; I owed a lot of money to my parents who, not at all wealthy, had given me all they had to fix what had gone wrong (and what I had ran away from). I was also in love with a married man, and my writing wasn’t showing the signs of success that I wanted. I worked as a translator, I had a job in a clothing store, and baby-sat in exchange for a car. I didn’t have health insurance, and I felt guilty for every dollar I spent on something that wasn’t essential. 

All those obstacles, I now understand, had taken the place of my eating disorder, of a knife cruising my arms, and of drugs and alcohol; the struggles of the years between 2012 and 2014, just like having guests over for dinner when I was a child, kept me from intimacy. My family lived far away, and my one profound relationship I had needed to be kept secret, which made it challenging, not realistic, and therefore not actually intimate. Intimacy comes with honesty and respect, and my love-affair unfortunately lacked either. 

Ben and I had known each other since I had gotten sober, but we only started dating in the summer of 2014. It had been love at first sight, and after only a few dates I followed him on the Hypnotic Eye Tour. I had never experienced anything remotely close to the life Ben was part of, and I had never met anyone like him: generous, loving, patient, caring, smart, and honest. He treated me like a queen. He gave me flowers, respected and admired me, loved me and desired me. He bought a Chlöe purse for me, and a Burberry coat for our first Christmas in Italy together. I stayed in the most beautiful hotels, traveled on a private plane, and for the first time in my life ate at a restaurant without worrying about the price of an entrée. The symptoms of early love replaced what the struggle had been doing — disconnecting me from intimacy. And so did the excitement, the novelty, and the marvel for a life I had never dreamed of. 

“…because I know who you really are – a junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war.” Mary Watson said. 

Let me give you two more examples, and maybe you can see where I am going with this story; maybe you have felt the same at some point in your life.

“Come see me in two weeks,” my OBGYN said to me when I was eight months pregnant with Catherine, “and if her position hasn’t changed we’ll discuss the possibility of a C-section.” I left his office in tears; I was terrified. I had dreamed of a natural birth, of laboring at home with my doula, of being caught by surprise at the first contractions. 

I didn’t want to have surgery.

Two dreadful weeks passed.

I should have been relieved when we found out that Catherine had perfectly positioned herself for natural birth. I should have been grateful and happy, but I wasn’t. I mean, I was, but there had been something about the state of fear between the first and the second visit that had had the same effect of the guest over for dinner, of the struggle of living in Los Angeles with little money, and of the excitement of being on tour with Ben.

Something similar happened when Ben was diagnosed (for the third time) with tongue cancer. Catherine was barely four months old when it happened; I have never been so scared of losing my husband. “God, don’t take him away from me,” I prayed, I begged. Approximately three weeks went by between the diagnosis and the surgery; we were exhausted. Days seemed to never pass, nights were too long, too. We just wanted to go back to the happiness new parents want to experience, to the memory of birth, and not to the fear of death.

“It’s all clear babe,” Ben said to me a week after the surgery. 

He was in excruciating pain, but the doctor had been able to successfully remove the cancerous part saving him from radiations, and from impaired speech. 

The gratitude I felt was immense; the love of my life was not going to die, and we could finally start our new life with Catherine. So why had the dread of the childhood autumn Sundays come back? Why was I feeling discontent? 

I thought I was a horrible, ungrateful person deserving of punishment.

In my childhood, I witnessed a lot of screaming, of anger, of fighting and arguing for small things. I have a beautiful family that, however, had unhealthy dynamics that brought me, through the years, to feel more comfortable with arguments and fights rather than with peaceful serenity. I have detached from those dynamics, went to therapy and worked on myself, but I wondered if that could be among the causes of my constant state of fear, of my phobias. For when life is serene I feel vulnerable, and vulnerability is intimacy. 

I always thought that the reason why I cut myself when I was younger was because I couldn’t feel, but the truth is that I have always felt deeply, and there had been a disconnection between the intensity of my feelings and my ability to contain and understand them.

When there isn’t a worry in sight, I create it because that’s what I have witnessed most of my life; that’s feels familiar to me.

The lifting of the evacuation orders during the Woolsey fire had triggered in me the memory of autumn Sundays when I was a child, and that of family dinners at the white round table that occupied almost the entire kitchen. 

This very personal feeling, I believe, is not uncommon in today’s society; intimacy can be frightening, and so does serenity. “This is too good to be true,” we think, “something bad will happen.” So while we await the happening of the bad we don’t feel safe taking all the good in.

Sometimes I think that what is good is a trick: “Don’t fall for it,” I say to myself.

Am I alone in secretly needing a life in fight-or-flight response to avoid the intimacy of my happy reality? Don’t misunderstand my words, I hurt for the people affected by floods, fires, hurricanes, poverty, war… I help in any way I can; I am socially and politically active, I do my part. But in a way, the hit of adrenaline that I get when a bad news is broken gets me high; it distracts me from the moment of intimacy at breakfast, or from the moment of affection on the couch, after dinner. The shock caused by a tragedy helps me deal with the vulnerability of a kiss, with the awkwardness of a hug, with the intimacy of an “I love you” whispered when I least expect it, and of an “it’s okay babe, nothing to worry about,” when I await the fight instead.

“WHAT: Repopulation

WHEN: Tuesday November 13, 2018 at 9:00 A.M.

WHERE: The following areas will be opened to residents and businesses beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning:

We will fully reopen the City of Hidden Hills. This will include all residences within the city limits as follows:

• West of Valley Circle Boulevard

• East of Crummer Canyon Road, and

• North of the Interstate 101 Freeway to the northern city limits

The City of Calabasas will have limited areas reopened which will include:

• West of Topanga Canyon Boulevard

• Northwest of Mulholland Highway

• North of Stunt Road

• East of Las Virgenes Road   East of the Lost Hills Road neighborhoods (including Lost Springs and Saratoga) South of the Los Angeles/Ventura County Line”

As it usually happens, I take a break from the essay that I am writing to mediate on the ending. 

I am finishing this essay on Saturday evening; it’s October 17th, Catherine is 11 months and one day. The weather is mild, a few leaves have changed in color, butternut squash soup is cooking on the stove, and apple spice cookies are out of the oven; I can smell cardamom from my office. We have friends over for dinner tonight, and it’s been a good day. The idea on how to finish this story came to me earlier in the morning, when Catherine had woken up from her morning nap and I decided to take her back to bed with me to nurse her. We are approaching the last days of breastfeeding, so I am enjoying every chance I get to be connected, mother and daughter as one. 

Ben was in bed with us, and as I looked into his eyes I saw pure surrender, pure joy, pure happiness. I think I saw bliss in his eyes, something that I have been looking for myself for years, but mostly since the beginning of my new book, the collection of essays this story is part of. 

The idea of how to end this chapter is very simple: this morning, for a brief moment, I was happy and I didn’t look for ways to threaten what was good. This morning everything was just fine — no big plans for the weekend, no glamorous event, no big travels in the imminent future, no big news for my career, no new purse or pair of shoes to get me high for an hour or two, “just” life, beautiful life in all its simplicity. 

I still don’t know why I dread Sundays, why dinner with my family wasn’t enough when I was a child, and why I still look for the storm rather than for the quiet that comes after. I still don’t know why peace creates war in my head. But being aware of it allowed a ceased fire today.

Hopefully I, too, will one day lift the evacuation orders I have enforced within myself.