Three Months Behind on Rent, Flat on My Back, and Completely Alone. Here's How I Survived.
There's a difference between loneliness and solitude. One nearly destroyed me. The other became my sanctuary.
The Truth About Loneliness vs. Solitude
How to survive the ache of being alone without slipping into despair
I didn’t understand the shape of loneliness until the night everything went still.
Four years ago, when Hurricane Laura damaged my house, my neighborhood, my history, and the rhythm of my life in one violent sweep, I thought the worst part was the physical loss. Walls. Furniture. Books. Paintings. The familiar creaks of a home that had held my entire adult life.This was my parents home that I bought after both had passed away.
But the real loss didn’t hit until later.
I landed in Lynchburg with a small van of things I managed to save and a broken spirit, and a nervous system so blown out it vibrated even in the quiet. My daughter and her family were here then. Close. Present. Their nearness softened the edges of everything. I told myself I’d rebuild. I told myself I was fine. And for a few months I was. In fact, I thought I’d found Nirvana! I painted like there was no tomorrow. And quickly joined local art clubs, even gave lectures on painting. Phew.
Then! Nine months later my daughter and her family packed up and moved away.
One month after that I got COVID and went down hard. Three months in bed. Unable to do anything but shuffle between the kitchen for soup and the bathroom for relief. Unable to market my art- my only means of income. Unable to make art. I had an emergency savings account but after the third month, it was empty.
That was the moment the floor fell out from under me.
.
I remember lying in this very room too sick to stand too tired to cry, the air thick with that strange post-COVID heaviness, thinking, so this is what alone feels like. The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was dense. It pressed against my ribs like a question I didn’t want to answer.
There was no one to tell me “You’re strong. You’ll bounce back.”
But the kind of quiet that followed wasn’t something you bounce back from.
You learn to sit inside it. Or you disappear under it.
At first I mistook all of it for loneliness.
Of course I did.
I had been stripped of my old life.
My family was gone.
My body was fighting for breath.
My home didn’t feel like home yet.
And there I was, a sixty-something woman, starting over in a city where no one knew me well enough to knock on the door and say, “Hey, you alive in there?”
That winter here stretched on forever, made worse by the collection emails and phone calls from the landlord. They wanted - and rightly so - their rent! I was now 3 months in arrears.
The nights were the worst.
I’d sit on the edge of the bed listening to the quiet and feel that hollow ache in my chest, the one that tells you you’re untethered from everything that used to hold you up. I didn’t know the word for it, but it felt like grief mixed with freefall. Like living suspended between what was gone and what hadn’t yet arrived.
But one night something shifted. A tiny small voice nudges me with an idea. Take your current inventory of paintings and put them on a go-fund me page. Offer one painting to each $100 donation. It took nearly three days to complete the go-fund page- something that should only take a matter of minutes. But that’s how hard it was for me to sit at my desk. I could manage about three minutes at a time. Just long enough to add a painting’s image to the go fund me page.
Long story made short, I finally released the go -fund me via FB and the friends did what friends do best, they showed up. And I generated enough money to secure my home all the rent and late charges to boot!
But that did not change what was still lingering within me: this solitude that felt like a massive weight tied around my ankle.
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