You Are Not Alone
by Molly Flinkman | November 2022
The year is 2016. Two friends sit with me at my kitchen table while our toddlers and preschoolers are occupied with blocks and books in the adjacent living room. We swap stories of our earliest days of motherhood in between sips of coffee and bites of orange cranberry scones. One of my friends shares a recurring fear she had when her son was a newborn in which she imagined dropping him in the washing machine while it was running. It came out of nowhere, she says, and it really scared me.
The other friend joins in: Intrusive thoughts, she says. I had them too.
Intrusive thoughts, I think, remembering how vividly I used to imagine dropping my newborn baby at the top of the stairs. It always came on suddenly and the darkness of it filled me with shame. Intrusive thoughts. I never knew they had a name. I never realized I might not be alone in experiencing them.
The year is 2019. I’m reading Little Women for the first time. Amy has just burnt all the pages of Jo’s handwritten manuscript and Jo has punished Amy by refusing to speak to her. After Amy—while chasing after Jo and Laurie—falls through the ice of a pond, Jo talks with her mother, Marmee, about her unrelenting anger. She wonders if she’ll ever learn to control it, and Marmee doesn’t miss the opportunity to open herself up.
I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, Marmee tells her.
These words—backlit from the screen of my Kindle—make me stop reading. I am angry nearly every day of my life, I think. I didn’t realize I might not be alone in my struggle to contain this emotion.
The year is 2022. Taylor Swift has just released a new album, and because Taylor Swift fandom is an important hallmark of my personality, I stay up until 11 p.m. CST to sample each song. At the beginning of the third track—44 seconds in, if you want to be exact about it—Taylor sings, It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem; it’s me.
Having suspected for some time now that the source of many of my daily frustrations is me, I consider how remarkable it is that Taylor Swift wrote a song I had already been singing in my head. She, too, it seems, is coming to terms with the fact that everyone else in her life isn’t the actual problem. Again, I realize I am not alone.
Did you know moles live alone in their intricate tunnels underground?
I learned this fact a few years ago after I came toe-to-toe with one in my backyard. Having never seen one in real life, it took me a second to figure out what it was. When I watched it instantly disappear into the earth, I knew I had some Googling ahead of me (the collection of useless information is another hallmark of my personality). I took my research back to my kids; I told them moles live alone.
“That’s weird,” my oldest daughter said, unable to fathom a life lived in that kind of isolation.
I think about that mole sometimes—more often, really, than a normal person is probably thinking about moles—because I create similar tunnels and rooms for myself. So often, I keep my various fears, problems, and intrusive thoughts far below the surface, as though no one else could ever possibly understand or relate. But while this might be normal behavior for a mole, it isn’t how it is meant to be for me. Even my kids seemed to innately understand this.
In all my various struggles and seasons of life, I have never been truly alone. So far, there is always someone else. Always. And what a gift when someone—a friend, a character in a book, or even a songwriter—pulls out an empty chair at her table and reminds me of this.
I can’t know for sure what you have buried beneath the earth, but I can tell you with certainty that you are not alone in any of it: sleepless nights, recent diagnoses, intrusive thoughts, holiday drama, late-night sadness, worry, loss, or the feeling that your life isn’t quite how you want it to be (to name a few of the things that keep us up in the middle of the night).
What would happen if we told these stories? What would happen if we pulled our own interior thoughts to the outside and shared ourselves more freely with the friends and fellow mothers who pull up seats at our tables?
I think we’d find the sunlight and breathe more easily in the fresh air.