Alone, Together: Lessons in Solitude and Solidarity
Accompanying Selections:
“Mind Playing Tricks On Me” — Geto Boys
“Me Against The World” — 2Pac, Dramacydal
“Solitude Is Bliss” — Tame Impala
“We’re A Winner” — The Impressions
“We’re Getting Stronger (The Longer We Stay Together)” — Loleatta Holloway
I remember feeling like I was going to die — my heart racing, my body weak. The apartment was empty. My roommates were gone. It was just me and my failing heart, dying alone on a rented bedroom floor. I remember calling 911, and those two EMTs, a man and a woman, carrying me out of the building. I wish I remembered her name. As she attempted to assess what was wrong, she began to comfort me. She told me that everything was going to be alright. And I believed her. Her words hit like a mild sedative, calming my spiraling thoughts.
We parted ways in the emergency room. I was handed off to a blitz of bodily scans, blood work, and questions. But as quickly as it all came, it ended as abruptly. And then it was just me again, left alone on a gurney. As hustling nurses, impatient doctors, and ailing patients rushed by, my thoughts began to turn inward. I felt discarded, confused, and scared. When the doctor finally returned, he told me that all of my tests came back normal. “You’re okay,” he said. “But you did have a panic attack.”
I wish I could say I was relieved. I understood a heart attack. Being Black and raised by a Black family, I had seen many. But a panic attack was new. It was unfamiliar. I had heard of them but never met anyone who had actually experienced one. I went home with this new awareness about myself, but I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not my roommates, not my family, not my friends. I just sat with it, grappling with the realization that I was now fighting an unseen and unfamiliar battle.
I grew up in a household where we never sat with much for too long, nor did we look to others to solve our problems. My grandfather worked five days a week at the steel mill, and on his off days, he laid bricks. My father was raised on a farm and maintained those hours well into adulthood. All I’ve ever known, all I was ever taught, is that we simply go to work. And that’s what I did. In the fall of 2016, I began what I soon learned to be “self-care.”
For my first act, I found a therapist. He was working towards his clinical hours, and I didn’t know what to expect, so we were sort of in it together. Our initial sessions were slow and difficult. I would stare at him, and he would stare back at me as we waited for the other to make the first verbal move. When I did try to speak, all that would come up was panic. I spent twenty minutes of our first session hiding alone in the bathroom, attempting to catch my breath. It took time, but eventually, I opened up. Not too much, but enough for the time to pass and for me to learn a little bit more about myself. But that wasn’t enough.
Intent on furthering my self-care, I added meditation to my routine. Every morning, before beginning my day, I would sit in a guided meditation courtesy of the Calm app. Hoping to cultivate a more mindful and present state, this ten-minute practice offered the perfect balance to my anxious mind. At first, it felt impossible, but gradually, I learned to sit with myself — first for a moment, then for a little longer, and longer still. But that wasn’t enough.
At the time, I didn’t know anything about psychosomatic symptoms. I just knew my chest hurt, I had body aches, and I felt a general physical unease. A visit to the doctor revealed some stress on one of my vertebrae and scar tissue from a previously undiagnosed rotator cuff tear. He suggested physical therapy and more exercise, and so I started to focus on my body. One-on-one physical therapy and solo gym sessions became an integral part of my self-care practice. I grew stronger in mind and body, but that wasn’t enough.
When I moved to New York in 2019, my anxiety escalated to levels I hadn’t seen since 2016. Therapy had opened me up, meditation had eased my mind, and exercise had strengthened my core, but the stress of moving across the country for a new job was overwhelming. Consequently, I decided to do even more. I started journaling about my anxiety and how it made me feel. I began reading books like Dare: The New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks and Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation to help better understand my relationship to anxiety and the underlying trauma from which it stemmed. When the pandemic hit, those workouts became living room Peloton sessions. I would journal before Zoom calls with my therapist. I would read at least a chapter of whatever book I was into right after my nightly yoga. I was doing everything I could to help my mental health. And I was doing it all by myself.
Alone.
Alone.
Alone.
Alone.
In the spring of 2021, my therapist shared that he was piloting a program for clients with similar backgrounds and traumas and invited me to join. I was curious but unsure of what to expect from this “group therapy.” It sounded like work, so naturally, I gave it a try.
Once a week, under the steady presence of our therapist, the four of us gathered together. We would begin with a breathing exercise, grounding us and drawing us fully into the present. We would then go around the room and share what we had been experiencing since our last call. We would respond with follow-up questions and reactions to each other’s experiences, never demanding or accusatory, just curious and supportive. After our updates, we would open the floor for discussion. Sometimes, it was one of us needing help with a relationship issue–a narcissistic partner or an abusive parent. Sometimes, it was navigating the debilitating symptoms of anxiety. And sometimes, it was simply telling our stories to one another. I remember someone detailing how their constant fatigue and inability to concentrate led them to a neurologist because they had assumed something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t help myself and shouted out, “Oh my, God! Me too!”
That was the day I learned about brain fog and dissociation.
In many ways, group therapy mirrored what I was already doing on my own, but there was one crucial difference: hearing these things from other people made it all feel so normal. Their stories reflected my own. I said kind and loving things to them that I could never say to myself. And in turn, they said those things back to me. The anxieties I clutched so closely to my chest weren’t just mine anymore; they were ours.
For the first time, I wasn’t alone.
Like many of us, I, too, had been swept up in the self-care movement. On the surface, it’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s something I wish I had as a child. I wish my parents and grandparents had had it. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t be so fucked up now. This emphasis on self-care became especially prominent during the pandemic when isolation was unavoidable. Forced to face previously unknown truths about ourselves, many of us had to find salvation in solitude. Ironically, the solitude that self-care often demands can deepen the very struggles it aims to heal. What I learned through group therapy was that we can’t completely heal in a silo. Meditation, therapy, journaling, yoga, and so much more, while available to us in community, more often than not actualize themselves in isolation–on our phones, via Zoom, in an empty living room. While meditation gave me calm and therapy provided clarity, community offered something neither could: connection.
Community is a simple yet profound antidote. It makes you feel less alone. One of the scariest aspects of anxiety is experiencing it by yourself, disconnected from those around you. I’ve often sat in public with a room full of people, thinking, “What if they know I’m anxious? What if I have to leave because of a panic attack? What will they think?” But so much of that fear dissipates when I’m in conversation with others. Simply sharing how I feel with someone else can radically shift my relationship with anxiety almost instantly. There’s a Chris Rock joke about moving a couch. It’s hard when you’re doing all the lifting, but two people can move a couch just fine. Whether mental, social, or otherwise, liberation does not happen in isolation. To save ourselves, we must save each other. We need to talk to one another, remind each other that we’re here, and share our burdens because, I promise you, those burdens are not just yours alone.
A while back, I was at dinner with some friends, discussing upcoming travel plans. Feeling safe with them, I admitted my growing fear of flying, a fear that began after my first panic attack. To my surprise, these two frequent world travelers, who I had known for many years, confessed that they, too, shared this fear. We laughed at our collective pain, traded traumatic experiences, and shared little mental tricks we used to get through the stress of being confined up in the air. In that moment, I didn’t feel so crazy, weird, or weak. Their admission didn’t erase my fear, but it made it less overwhelming knowing I wasn’t alone.
“Flying is a good example of how well people hide their fears. Statistics show about 30 percent of all passengers on any given flight are nervous about flying and about 10 percent are extremely anxious-but it’s hard to spot those 10 percent during a flight. They sit tight and secretly grip on to their armrests until their knuckles turn white-all without making a peep. They’re going through sheer terror but hide it well because of an even greater fear, the fear of shame. The fear of humiliation.” — Barry McDonagh, Dare: The New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks (2015)
I’ve lived much of my life in a silo. Another inheritance of growing up Black in America, emotions were treated like luxuries, distractions from our collective reality. The hands of my father and my grandfathers, the women who raised me, are calloused because they believed that there was little time for tears when work needed to be done. We came together for Sunday dinners and family celebrations, but healing was an internal fight. “Stop all that crying” and “You’ve gotta be a man” were directives I heard from adults at far too young an age. This mindset shaped my early understanding of strength. It developed in me an ideology that nobody cared about my pain, so handle your shit and get back to work. These early lessons in stoicism became a fortress, one that protected me but also trapped me inside. I learned to exist in solitude, mistaking it for strength. It’s a state I’ve grown comfortable with, though I hesitate to call it natural. Nobody’s truly meant to be alone.
And I know that I’m not the only one who’s suffered through this mode of thinking. As much as I celebrate my recently found desire for community, I also understand how foreign and uncomfortable it is for many of us to rely on it. It’s fucking hard, I truly get that. Just last week, my career coach asked me to survey people in my life about how they perceive me and how I show up in the world. Of the many assignments she had given me, this was, by far, the most difficult. I had to ask for help. I had to rely on my community. And while in theory, I understand that I have people who are here for me, I still struggle to accept it in practice. But as I saw each and every one of them jump at the opportunity to help me, I can tell you from experience that there are individuals who want to support you, people who want to help you heal and need you as part of their healing community as well.
We need connection — in mental health settings, social contexts, and beyond. As a child, I gravitated toward writing because it was a solitary pursuit. But now, I write to connect. My hope is that you’ll read this and think, “Oh my God, me too!” Individual self-care is important, but it’s not enough on its own. We need therapy and shared laughter over kickball games. We need meditation and meaningful conversations around the dinner table. Healing isn’t a solitary road; it’s a shared journey where we lift each other along the way.
