One of the last times I was touched by another human being was at a drag show in Phuket, Thailand a few days after my 40th birthday. Two-ish days after that, the first Covid death was reported in the United States, and I landed at JFK with a vicious UTI and plans to write a story about how quickly a cheap thrill can turn dark under the beam of a cheap flashlight; an allegory, really, that proves that even once a woman is technically “over the hill,” she’s never too old to encounter a new variety of sexual assault. A month later, I’d hear another person’s heartbeat for the last time as I got what I didn’t know would be my last hug, and since then, I have only been intentionally touched five times*, all in medical contexts. It’s also been more than a year since I’ve talked about my vagina in public, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gone without so much as a casual brush of a cashier’s fingertips handing me change. Once upon a time, I made a tattoo appointment just to get a deeper sensation than a twice-monthly mani-pedi could reach. Back then, I was separated from my ex, but now, I am a single, childless orphan—three kinds of alone that so many women fear being at 41 above all else—and while I never aimed to end up fundamentally alone in the world, here I am, raw-dogging life without so much as an emergency contact or a primary care physician, and much to many people’s chagrin, I’m neither ashamed to be a single, childless orphan, nor am I afraid that I’ve failed at life for having become one. It’s not that I’ve never failed, it’s that being a single, childless orphan is not a failure, and it isn’t my failure that got me here. I never wanted marriage or children, and I’ve told stories on stages across the country and on television about what glorious monsters my parents were, so mine is not a tale of woe and loneliness, but a complex story of objective aloneness, one of compounding alienation as well as radical self-reflection and acceptance; one that illustrates how vulnerable even the baddest bitch can be without support from a community and how we all play our parts in tearing down the baddest bitches for existing while vulnerable.

“Single, childless, orphan” is just a list of objective facts about my life, and yet the more at ease I am with all three, the more uncomfortable everyone else seems to get, leaving me at odds with the world in ways that coupled, childful, parented people simply can’t seem to wrap their heads around. When I say the words, “I am alone,” people hear me say, “I feel alone,” as if there’s no difference, but trust me. There is. When I say, “I’m alone,” my friends say things like, “Same, girl,” before adding, “I have to go because So-and-So just got home, kiddo needs something, and mom is calling on the other line,” leaving me with the residue of their cognitive dissonance.

When forms ask for an emergency contact, every time I leave it blank, there is always someone there to remind me of what I already know I don’t have: “You know, a parent? A spouse? A sibling? A trusted friend?” When I share anecdotes like these with people, no matter who they are, they nearly always tell me, “Aww, you’re not alone! I’ve got your back!” and sometimes, they pause for a second and realize they can’t bring me to a hospital from 500 miles away or take care of my dogs if something were to happen to me; they have no legal right or real desire to be by my bedside or make decisions about my critical care, and while I’ve had a long time to process this, it’s too much for them in the moment, and I’ve deprogrammed my response to comfort them, so they change the subject to holiday festivities they hosted and didn’t think to invite me to, and then it’s another few months until we make time to catch up again.

And it’s fine. Just like I understand that it’s an objective fact that I’m alone, I understand the objective fact that they are not, and while one might read this as an indictment or as some kind of wish for everyone to include me in everything, it’s not. I do wish people could see other people where we are, not where we need each other to be in order to maintain our illusions. If my friends could see my objective aloneness instead of trying to convince me that it doesn’t exist, maybe I wouldn’t feel as alone. Maybe I wouldn’t actually be alone. I know that while my friends are with their partners, kids, and families, I’m out of sight and out of mind, but they seem to forget that I don’t disappear from myself or grow a family when our conversations end. I have to live it whether they can bear to confront it or not, so I continue learning how different it really is to be alone and to feel alone. 

We are, after all, a social species, which means that we’re hardwired to seek partnership and social connection and familial relations to avoid being or feeling vulnerable, and I seek these things, too, but we may not realize that people are also programmed to stigmatize, marginalize, blame, exclude, or be suspicious of the unpartnered, the childfree, the one who lived, and others who are, for whatever reasons, socially disconnected, and this pattern of distancing people who are already distanced, and therefore vulnerable, has real costs even for me.

Add to the collage of solitudes that I’m a queer Jew from New York with PTSD/CPTSD and a few more spoonfuls of alphabet soup in my brains and that I spent most of my adult life in Appalachia—nine of those years on a mountain in the woods with a man whose undiagnosed mental illnesses showed up in terrifying psychotic episodes—and trust that this isn’t even where my story started to get weird. Slather all of that with the knowledge that my life completely exploded in 2018 when I fled from that relationship and landed in a small, shitty town hundreds of miles from what I’d called home for fifteen years with no community beyond my two old Basset hounds, and you’ll begin to notice that spending the past year-plus sheltering in place as a single, childless orphan on the tail-end of that disaster has been a uniquely isolating, yet spiritually enlightening experience that—as a professional storyteller—I’d really like to share with the world in hilariously morbid detail, but...as I know, and as just about everyone else in the world can confirm: it takes support to share our stories, let alone say and do all the things to stay positive and productive, the two things society seems to value above all else, and in spite of my immense privilege that has enabled me to get this far without family or others invested in my survival, support is one thing I simply cannot provide for myself, nor can I seem to earn it as an outspoken intersectional feminist in a circle of people going through their own shit, many of whom seem to have liked me better when I was weak—aka when I presented more like what they’d expect and need a single, childless orphan with a history of abuse and mental illness to look like. After spending 2019 mending the seams that came undone in 2018, the pandemic denied me access to the raw social materials I’d need to refill and rebuild what I lost outside of myself, and left with only the toxic platforms of social media to forge fulfilling friendships, it’s no wonder I’ve failed.

There is a deep, insidious matrix of nuanced intersectional issues underlying the narrative of how I slipped into an obscure, hidden margin that keeps me silenced, underemployed, and powerless, but there is also a deep, insidious matrix of intersectional issues underlying the narrative of how I survive, live, and sometimes manage to thrive off to the side on my own that we can summarize in one word: privilege. White privilege. Cisgender privilege. Economic, educational, and intellectual privilege. Pretty privilege…name a privilege, I probably have some form of it, including what I refer to as orphan privilege and trauma privilege.

Because let’s face it: under normal, non-pandemic, BeforeTimes circumstances, being a single, childless orphan was often pretty fuckin’ great: none of the toxic and/or annoying stereotypical relationship shit; none of the physical, emotional, financial, or other burdens and sacrifices associated with bearing and raising the future; no abusive, codependent rituals and holiday gatherings with monsters, predators, and thieves; and in spite of occasional recreational hazards like the one that ruined an already terrible drag show last February, I can fuck who I want when I want and explain myself to no one, so yes. Being alone in the world has its perks. 

And so does having lived through and healed from trauma. It’s not all triggered meltdowns, panic attacks, and dissociation. Living with and continuously healing from PTSD and CPTSD means deep, dark empathy and an awkward, intimate level of understanding when it comes to dysfunction and suffering. This privilege comes fully equipped with military-grade strategy, adaptability, resiliency, and improvising skills, and painstakingly crafted coping mechanisms like the ability to laugh through failure, having boundaries like a motherfucker, and seeing vulnerability as a way of life. My ability to be comfortable with the most uncomfortable moments, the most uncertain of futures, the most unconscionable tragedies is most certainly an unsung privilege that many people have, one earned largely behind closed doors and usually borne with shame that I can’t bear to carry anymore. Shamelessness is, perhaps, the most cryptic privilege.

My myriad privileges unequivocally enable and allow me to still appear and be pretty okay, but ironically, my okayness has also become a liability such that I have faked it and maked it as far as one person can on their own, but I have not made “it,” and I have reached my limit of what I can do entirely by myself. I‘ve gotten really good at slaying the performance of okayness to avoid looking like the single, childless orphan of every woman’s worst nightmare, and even before the pandemic, I was practiced at performing the social-media-ready okayness-with-being-not-okay-ness that measures the tone of my grief and vulnerability against the angles and filters of sadness and sex appeal to create the illusion of a relatable feeling. Performative vulnerability—the glamorous sorrow and broken strength captioned with silver linings—keeps everyone aware, but also comfortable, which steepens the climb back up from not-really-okay.

The reward is an expectation to hustle more and perform more and mask more and exploit myself more and do more unpaid, thankless labor to maybe earn myself an opportunity to rise from the ashes again on my own, and be even okayer than ever, and I. simply. can’t. Besides, if a phoenix rises from the ashes, and nobody’s there to see it, how do we know it has risen and not just turned to dust?

After what we’ve all been through, it’s getting harder for even the strongest versions of me to conjure hidden energy stores and keep myself from succumbing to human programming that insists my tale of objective aloneness is a tale of woe, but I’m not sad. As unimaginable as it is, and as unsympathetic a poster-child as I may make, I am disenfranchised, and it’s clear that like all disenfranchised people, I’m expected to tap into bottomless reservoirs of self-knowledge to know what help I need and then summon the courage to ask for it no matter how many asks, large and small, have gone ignored before, and to ultimately settle for the detritus of human kindness wrung dry through the channels of self-serving charitability and good intentions that sound less like, “I see you,” than, “I’m uncomfortable, so please go away.” Like all of us out here on the margins, I’m expected to live in gratitude and either manifest some kind of bootstrap magic, or just accept a life of languishing on this weird line between sublime disconnectedness and ineffable solitude several lines away from the limits of what most people can even see, let alone comprehend, and I say, Fuck That. All of that. Because, really: if this is how easy it is for people like me to erase and diminish people like me, if this is what we do to each other, what are we doing to those more vulnerable, more disenfranchised, and more marginalized than I am, and what are they to do about it? If my role as a white woman of privilege is to make noise and reach back, what am I to do when my hands are tied, and I’ve been told to shut up by the people who’ve “got my back”?

The uniquely unrelatable feeling of my existence seems especially poignant when I hear my own stories in everyone else’s stories and find at the end of them all that I’m still missing that one thing everyone else names as The Thing that has always kept them going: support. You know. A parent. A spouse. A sibling. A trusted friend.

With nobody out there waiting for me, planning with me, saving a spot for me, or even seeing me out here on tiptoe trying to walk this line of aloneness, it’s a sobering, humbling fact that being vaccinated will change very little for me. It’s not like a supportive partner, family, friend group, or workplace will suddenly materialize. I get to pick up snacks and almond milk with a decreased level of existential threat and get the haircut that was already long overdue when my appointment was canceled last April. I can go for a walk farther than two miles from my house now that I’ll be able to use a public restroom. All good things, sure, but for most people, the haircut and grocery runs and walks are precursors to joyful reunions and postponed celebrations that I simply can’t manufacture for myself. Instead, I remind myself that while most people in the US have been selfishly and ignorantly going about their lives for months, the rest of the world won’t even see vaccines for another few years, so I’m still among the luckiest ones.

But still.

I called the suicide hotline recently, and the gentle-voiced volunteer didn’t understand why I was calling when I told her I wasn’t suicidal. “My dogs are turning twelve soon,” I explained, “and once they’re gone, I’m afraid I will be suicidal without anybody else on my team,” and she said, “I’m hearing you say that you’re lonely,” and I sighed, and I said, “Sometimes, but this isn’t about that,” and she said, “Are you or anyone you know thinking of harming themselves?” and I thought about all of the desperately lonely people I know, the ones who might not be single, childless, or an orphan, but who don’t have the privileges I have, who have bigger, more insidious intersectional issues underlying their narratives, and I couldn’t answer the question honestly, so I gave the easy answer, “No,” and then made it hard again. “I’m worried I may be suicidal when my dogs are gone, though. I’m worried about my future self.” She paused and said, “Are your pets okay?” and I laughed because of everyone I know, my dogs are the okayest, and I said, “Yes, they’re just getting old, and I’m a single, childless orphan,” and she said, “Aww,” and I ignored her and said, “As long as these two dogs are here, I have someone on my team everyday. There’s one more heartbeat I can listen to other than my own,” and she interjected, “Didn’t you say you had more than one dog?” and I said, “Yes, I have two, but one of them doesn’t like to be cuddled, and I respect his boundaries, and I worry that if I don’t figure something out before they’re gone, I...I’m trying to be proactive.” I hung up with a referral to some online support groups, and knowing that this is a sanctioned version of people mistaking aloneness for loneliness; feeling the volunteer’s gentle insistence that my differentiation between the two is evidence of denial; knowing a support group isn’t what I need, but also knowing that if I didn’t at least try, the next therapist I saw would take it as a sign of hopelessness and depression and strongly recommend I get on medication; knowing I had nothing else to do that night, I plucked up both my curiosity and my penchant for self-effacing bias confrontation and joined a Zoom of the desperately-loneliest-looking people I’ve seen in a while hosted by two toxically positive intern-types who played “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves and asked the three of us why this song makes us feel happy, and when asked what songs make us happy, I had to dig deep into my workout playlist for a song that was both upbeat and clean, and I failed the second mark by two fuck-words, and by the time the Zoom was over, all I could think was, “Maybe I should call that hotline now.”

The only significance of the hounds turning twelve is that it ushers them into the window of their breed’s average life expectancy, and with only them at the heart of my team, I can’t ignore how this milestone in their mortality feels so spiritually intertwined with my own. I’d like to celebrate, but while neither of them cares that much about toys, they’ll literally fight tooth and nail to prevent each other from having anything special. I can tap into that eternal wellspring of gratitude, reframe any somber feelings into candy-coated blessings, and create a makeshift celebration for myself—again—but after thirteen months of makeshift celebrations that are eerily similar to the makeshift memorials, I favor the ordinary days, which always have those two, old meatballs at the center anyway.

I have spent this past year examining what it means to be both objectively and subjectively alone, the kind of alone where even the closest friendships are reduced to sporadic meme swaps, the kind of alone that felt realest when many of the married-with-kids people left in my circle were either stacking ammo or packing their Election Day go-bags to flee to their parents’ country houses, and I was grateful to have gas in the generator and three rounds in my Glock just in case a final act of resistance was in order. The kind of alone that means I have to drive three hours to get my first hug in over a year because that’s where the closest, safest heartbeat and pair of arms are, and while I can’t ignore how pitiable one might find it that I have nobody closer, and this might make you look at that parent, spouse, sibling, or trusted friend you’ve been taking for granted just a little more fondly for a moment, I’m just grateful I don’t have to go any farther than that.

I’m so fucking grateful.

Remember: this is not a tale of woe, so of course, the friend I’d drive six hours round-trip to hug happens to be a Black, queer priest and science teacher who is also kind of Jewish and the most brilliant person I know because like the characters in any tale of compounding unrelatability, the ones left in my story are unrelatably alone and fabulous in their own ways, too, and even though he has parents and students and is married to The Lord, I can’t think of anyone more likely to understand what thirteen months of only five touches might feel like.

*****

* Touch 1: I smoked so much weed on the hour drive to Dr. Beth‘s office for my annual physical in early August that I had flashbacks to a Cypress Hill concert in 1994 that I didn't attend. By then, it had already been a while since I was indoors with another human being apart from my brisk, terrifying jaunts to the store for snacks and almond milk, so I got myself insane in the membrane and braced myself for a Pap smear that never came. Dr. Beth took my blood pressure, asked me if I had any moles that needed checking, and said we’d “swab my lobby” next year.

Touch 2. In early November, some rando gave me a flu shot at CVS while a maskless, slack-jawed delivery person stared at me like the beam from a cheap flashlight.

Touch 3. This February, I emailed Dr. Beth to say I had BV. She said I had to come in for that, so I summoned my inner B. Real, and braced myself again. “Do you know what BV is?” Dr. Beth asked. “Yes, I’ve had it before,” I replied, and yet, she still chose to say, “It’s like when that one family moves in next door, and suddenly: there goes the neighborhood.” So, to recap, the third time in 11 months that I was intentionally touched by another human being was for a pelvic exam I didn’t really need from my now-ex-doctor, the racist, misogynist, body-shaming innuendo enthusiast.

Touch 4. & 5. A woman named Lydia at the Rite Aid gave me my Covid shots on 3/18 and 4/15.