Ask Me A Question

 I want you to do something before you read this.

Scroll through these photos:

Take your time. They're just family photos. Nothing overly special.

Now tell me what you notice.

I'll tell you what I notice.

I'm not there.

Not in the pizza night. Not in the Christmas with the Snoopy tie. Not at the science fair. Not in any of the ordinary Tuesdays that somehow became the whole of our early years together.

I was there for every single one. I made most of them happen. I was standing three feet away, every time.

I was just the one holding the camera.

I showed these photos to someone who knows my entire story. Who had read every word I'd written about loneliness and military life and the specific kind of invisible that comes from running a household for eighteen years. Someone who, theoretically, knew exactly what to look for.

They needed three passes to see it.

That's not a criticism. That's the point. That's how quiet this kind of alone is. It doesn't announce itself. It just accumulates. In camera rolls and pizza nights and Christmases where everyone is smiling and nobody thinks to turn the camera around.

I never liked being alone.

As a teenager, as a college kid, I stayed as busy as possible because quiet left too much room for my own thoughts and I was not interested in that. I was the person who filled the calendar, who needed the noise, who did not do well with empty space.

Then I married into the military.

Nearly two decades of it.

Nearly half of my life filled with training and schedules and TDY's and deployments and odd shifts and coming home to a house that was full of children and completely, profoundly quiet in the way that only happens when the one person you want to talk to isn't there. I adapted, as every military spouse has to do. I don't like alone, but I can do alone now. Afterall, I was alone at 2am with a colicky baby. Alone the first time a school called and I had to take a kid to urgent care and couldn't reach Jason for hours. Alone when Gena broke her leg. Alone for doctor appointments. Alone waking up from surgery.

Alone during the first year of COVID, locked in a house with four young kids, going slowly out of my mind.

I convinced myself it would get easier when he retired.

(insert ALL the laughing emojis ever created right here because

 1) I'm an old person who gets told I use too many emojis,

and 2) you know that saying, "when you make plans, God laughs in your face?"

Ya...

...   

...

Guess what?

 I got laughed at.

He moved into a supervisory role that kept him busy twelve-plus hours a day, and then we opened the practice, and then there was the building of clients and the paperwork and the certifications and the late nights. Two ships passing in the night is the most accurate thing I can say about how we functioned for a long time.

My best friend was three feet away and I was lonely.

Here's the part nobody talks about: you can be surrounded by people — a full and loud and chaotic house — and still feel completely isolated. In fact sometimes the fullness makes it worse. Because you look around at all of it and you think surely someone else sees this. Surely I am not the only one bothered by the dishes, the laundry, the shoes at the door, the backpacks dropped in the middle of the floor, the mess that regenerates overnight like it has its own ecosystem.

And then nobody moves. And nobody notices. And you're standing in the middle of your own life feeling invisible.

That is possibly the loneliest I ever feel. Not the 2am deployments. Not the surgery. The Tuesday afternoon in my own living room, surrounded by everything and everyone, completely alone in caring about any of it.

There have been more times than I can count — usually in the middle of a fight, usually when I've run out of grace,  where I've looked at Jason and said 'okay, roommate.' (And proceeding to ever-so-NOT-gracefully leave -- read: stomping from -- the room.)

Not enemy. Not stranger. Roommate. Someone I live alongside, split the bills with, pass in the hallway. Someone who was right there for every pizza night and Christmas and science fair.

Just not in the same photo.

I made mistakes in that loneliness. When the kids were small and I had no one to talk to, I talked to them. Vented to them. Said things about marriage and military life and the weight of doing it all alone that I thought they'd forget.

They didn't forget.

I know that now because I can see it — in how they talk about relationships, in how they talk about me or to  me sometimes. Kids absorb everything, especially the things you say when you think they're not really listening.

I'm not telling you that to beat myself up about it, although I do so, often. I'm telling you because I wish someone had told me, in a way I could understand, that loneliness left untreated finds an outlet whether you choose one or not. It needed somewhere to go and I didn't have anywhere healthy to put it.

That's not a character flaw. That's what happens when you feel like you don't have enough support, for long enough.

Jason is my best friend. Which sounds like a good thing - and it is - but it also means that when we fight or hit a rough patch, I realize just how few other places I have to land. I have a lot of acquaintances who have never been the kind you call when things are hard. I spent most of my adult life moving from base to base, never staying long enough to build the deep kind of friendships that survive distance and time.

So the loneliness in my marriage isn't separate from the loneliness in my life. They're the same thing wearing different faces.

What I've figured out, after nearly 2 decades or 18 years or 6,570 days or 157, 680 hours or 9, 460,800 seconds of this - Rent, anyone?

I've figure out: the loneliness doesn't mean you're in the wrong marriage. It doesn't mean your partner doesn't love you. It usually means you've both been running so hard for so long that the connection got pushed to the back burner and you stopped noticing until it was really, actually cold.

It means you need more than one person to be your whole world, and most of us — especially those of us who moved a lot, or gave everything to a role, or spent years just surviving — haven't built that yet.

It means the mess on the floor isn't really about the mess. It rarely is.

It means you're going to have to say something out loud. Speak up. Be the one to bridge the distance. Invite them to walk life with you, not just beside you.

It's not a failure to ask.

It never was.

Go back and look at that last photo in the carousel. The one where I'm finally in the frame.

I'm right there. Next to him. Looking straight at the camera.

Still alone.

Feeling alone in your marriage is normal.

It comes and goes like the seasons.

Staying there without saying so is optional.

— Holly | Life Behind the Screens