by featured writer: Anne Liu Kellor

Anne Liu Kellor, *Witnessing My Younger Self,* photograph. Courtesy of the author.

Alone

Anne Liu Kellor / Nov 2021 / Issue 11

I used to think that I was good at being alone. I spent seven years alone in my twenties—seven years without a partner—with the exception of a few short-lived crushes and one-night-stands. But this was back in the late nineties. I didn’t have a cell phone and social media wasn’t a thing, so being alone felt like I was truly alone. I had a few dear friends, but they had partners or lived in other cities. And so, I often spent days barely speaking to another person. I rarely worried about safety. I was unreachable anytime I stepped out my door.

Now, I never leave my home without my phone; after all, what if I have an emergency, or what if my son or parents have an emergency? Back then, I was not worried about such things. No one was trying to call me, and I mostly was just trying to reach God. I didn’t obsess over the fact that I was without a partner. Of course, deep down, I still wanted one, but I put my faith in greater Paths and Plans, opening my heart towards larger questions of how I could help ease the suffering of the world. I took myself so seriously.

I left college and backpacked through China, the country of my mother’s birth. When I came home to the Pacific Northwest, I stopped wearing makeup and contacts; dressed in long draping ponchos, thick glasses, baggy cords, lug-soled Doc Martens. My best friend—and by proxy, a lot of my friends—were queer. Maybe men thought I was too? Who knows, it was Olympia, WA in the 90s where everyone dressed like a dirty hippy or riot grrrl. Communing with nature, practicing tai chi, and writing questions in my journal about my spiritual path became my main concerns. Noticing the quality of light or the timing of a heron swooping in to greet me were my messages and alerts. And without yet knowing to call it the male gaze, I was also rejecting the male gaze. I wanted to shed my dependence on how others saw me, to cast off that short leash of constantly seeking another’s approval. I wanted to know myself intimately, from within. I wanted to know God. God could be spoken through many names—the Universe, Dharma, Cosmos, Great Mystery, Beloved; I had no religious upbringing, so I was neither attached to nor repelled by certain names.

But now I can name what I couldn’t then: I was also terrified of human rejection.

***

A Chinese restaurant. Seattle, 1979, I am four. I sit in a red booth by the window. Outside the sky is dark. Light drops of rain hit the pavement. My parents and their friend sit across from me, eating, talking, reaching chopsticks, raising bowls, clinking spoons. Waiters rush back and forth to the kitchen. A tank of live fish sits near the door. We ate one of them for dinner.

A man walking by on the sidewalk pauses. He leans over, face close to the glass, and puffs his cheeks big and round, skin pale, eyes bulging. Staring. At me. My mouth drops and I turn quickly back towards the table, but my parents have seen nothing. I look up, but the man is gone now, walking away, grey coat fading into drops of steamy glass. I am confused, feet dangling off the edge of the smooth leathery seat. Should I be afraid? My parents keep talking, I say nothing. Looking back out the window, I trace my finger in a swirl across the glass. It rains. My parents call me, telling me it’s time to go.

***

In her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl writes, “We only store in memory images of value.” I often quote this line to my writing students as a way of saying: trust in the so-called randomness of your memories. You may not know yet why this moment, over so many others, still resides in your body. But trust that meaning is lodged there. Something to first notice, then slowly digest, even if it may take years to frame in a way that makes sense.

The first time we are consumed.

The first time we are seen.

The difference that lies in between.

***

Recently divorced and living alone or with my child during a global pandemic, I think about the girl I was at four, I think of who I was in my twenties, and wonder what she knew about befriending solitude that I have forgotten. A part of me admires my younger self, how I made peace with being alone, and I want her to reteach me her ways. But I also don’t fully trust my memory of how I actually experienced life then, or rather how well I understood my own needs.

What the pandemic and divorce have made painfully clear is that when I’m hurting, solitude or communing with God and Nature are not enough. Virtual friends and care sent through the Internet are not enough. I need real live breathing people. I need a therapist. I need touch. I need deep sustaining conversations with friends every week, people who check in on me. Or, that one special person, with whom we mutually check in on each other. Every day. Because after seven years of so-called peace with solitude, I promptly grew used to having a partner—for a straight run of nineteen years—and as such, I lost touch with that intensely spiritual, solitary girl of my twenties, the one who prided herself on her independent drifting. Instead, now, as a mother to an eleven-year-old and a writing teacher who knows the gift of belonging to a larger community, I still crave solitary retreat—the ability to go invisible—but those days have become the exception not the norm. For now I have learned, it is a lovely thing to be seen and known by more than a few. It is a lovely thing to name, write, and share my love and pain—in community. A community I longed for but couldn’t access in my twenties. Because I couldn’t see myself reflected in the sanghas or institutions that already existed. Because I was young and transient. And because I was still so afraid of exposing myself, of revealing all of my love, longing, and shame.

***

Nowadays, forced to be reacquainted with my solitude, I’m trying to remember how to be a more “spiritual” person. But I’ve mostly given up on feeling like my practices need to look like other peoples’. For example, sitting meditation is not for me. Instead, most days I write and walk and get down on the floor to stretch atop my foam roller. Sometimes I just need to drink wine, smoke pot, eat chips, and watch The Bachelor. Or, when things feel hard, I light candles and incense and place my hand on my heart or snuggle a pillow and send myself love, messages of witnessing and care. For when your heart gets broken again, when something dies, when your eye starts twitching or insomnia hits, when you realize your body is asking for more than the usual go-to relaxation tactics, it becomes necessary to shed everything non-essential and tend to what is. To go for a walk in the morning before work. Or to take long baths and deep breaths at night instead of mindless distraction. To engage in direct intervention. In ritual. Whether or not you give it a name like meditation or prayer. It’s all a matter of listening to what your body needs. The body holds so much information.

***

As a child, I found refuge in my bedroom, in my closet, in my books. I was aware of a wider world of adult emotion and anxiety all around me, but that world was rarely aware of me. As such I learned early how to protect myself from the duality of witnessing, yet not being witnessed. How to hide, disappear, tunnel deeply underground.

Over time, I came to see my solitude as a necessary portal, as something that would bring me closer to God—to finding acceptance and peace in the present moment, to letting go of useless grasping and suffering. But what I couldn’t name then is how I denied myself a different kind of longing. How it is not weakness to admit you want to be deeply loved by another human being.

And how when I say that I want to be loved, what I mean is, to be seen.

I see you, little girl.

I see you now.

Throughout the pandemic, my heron has also returned.

Throughout the pandemic, my heron has also returned. I came to love the heron in my twenties, noticing when it showed up as I stood on a shoreline, how it swooped in before me with majestic wings, how its solitary stalking spoke to my own quiet watchfulness. How it showed up as my witness or my guide. Now, the heron has returned, or rather, I have started to notice it again. The heron has always been here—nesting somewhere near the pond, feeding each day. It is I who have returned, more receptively, to take notice. It is I who have shown up again to say, “Teach me. Move me. Remind me I am not alone.” The heron has been here all along.

I have a new lover. I am not ashamed to say that this thrills me, for despite remembering the gifts of solitude—the way it forces you to find a new intimacy within and beyond—I still do not want to be alone. We’ve been dating for over a year now, but we only see each other at most once a week, because we are busy and we live an hour apart. The transition between spending a long, sumptuous weekend communing in bodily pleasures, conversation, music, laughter—to coming home and facing the reality of parenting, work, chores, stress, bills, ants, leaking pipes, a book to promote, all of this, everything—can feel rough. The heaviness that can suddenly hit, the tightening of my chest, an accumulated amorphous grief of too many days gone by without a good cry. If I were living with another or seeing someone more often, I wouldn’t be paying this close attention. I would reflexively reach out to fill my needs through that person, before I had time to notice and name them myself.

And so, for now, I am grateful for this in-between arrangement. Nights spent doing what I want, watching what I want, reading late, cultivating playlists, and most importantly—learning to pay better attention to my body. It reminds me of how I ultimately seek refuge in both worlds: in the joyous delight of belonging to another, and in belonging within my own sweet solitude.

Anne Liu Kellor is a mixed-race Chinese American writer, editor, coach, and teacher based in Seattle. Her essays have appeared in YES! Magazine, Longreads, The Seventh Wave, Witness, New England Review, Fourth Genre, Entropy, The Normal School, Los Angeles Review, Literary Mama, and many more. Anne is the recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, The Seventh Wave, Jack Straw Writers Program, 4Culture, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She loves to support writers in finding their voice and community. Her memoir, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging was released in 2021 and praised by Cheryl Strayed as “insightful, riveting, and beautifully written.” Learn more at www.anneliukellor.com