What happens when solitude is akin to home?

When the stitch of urban pavement, the zipper of metal automobiles is what needs conquering where my personal demons are concerned?

Because a lack of solitude makes me uneasy.

It was suburbanization that made me doubt if I could face the woman I was amidst the cash registers, the four lanes of traffic, and the matching shams and duvet with yellow flowers.

In a recent Outside magazine article, Thayer Walker, dropped off on a deserted island for 20 days, notes, "When the skills that serve you so well in society become worthless, a lot of scary shit comes out."

i.e. He had "self confidence" problems.

 

I have the opposite problem.

I've written elsewhere of how, during the scant years of my early twenties when I inhabited a Midwest suburban city, I had this craving to have my flesh scraped, picked away at, to expose something more raw.

Social skills be damned.

Driving down a tollway I imagined tall concrete highway dividers rubbing at my deltoids. I imagined leaning forward, chest first, to grind down the armor.

I wanted something to break me open—an ice axe to chip down to what hints of Vermont I had left hidden in my flesh.

 

(I wonder now, if, in some other mental state, I might have been a cutter. There was something so urgent about the flatness of my body. It would have been so simple ... )

In solitude, I am naked.

 

And if, in this stripped state of being, pores bleed truth, then to clamp down on that very state of being is to suffocate.

And I am most at ease in nakedness.

It is, I suppose, why I'm half to blame for a certain running teams' naked runs through the woods each season.

It is why I disagree with the statement that skinny dipping is best done after dark.

It is why, perhaps, I stand stronger in the company of no one.

Why you find me here, in the mountains, rather than a suburban jungle.

Yet the irony is, after retreating from said suburbia, after regaining my naked state, I learned to be romp bare in the presence of others.

I learned how to walk down a city street without needing an ice pick; to sweat hayfields, pine trees and granite dust in the hot heat of a paved summer.

TAGS: cutters, cutting, Jennifer Duffield White, mountains, nakedness, suburbia

JENNIFER DUFFIELD WHITE is neither a flower child nor a wild child, merely a hybrid of the two. When she's not playing outside in wild places, she writes. Despite her love of the Adirondacks, she now lives in Montana and is working on an MFA in fiction. You can find her writing in publications such as Adirondack Life and Women's Adventure, as well as obscure horticulture magazines and the occasional literary journal. She is an associate poetry editor for The Nervous Breakdown.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Essays, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.