The grief of hyper-independence

Our medicine for a more equitable, just, creative world is our communities. In community we can alchemize what we can barely tolerate alone. Our path to a fulfilling life is a path filled with meaningful relationships. I don’t know why I am using a finance bro analogy here, but our relationships have compounding interest. The more we invest in our people, the more that investment grows on itself over and over and over. That’s how brilliant lives are made. These are the webs through which brilliant ideas are shared. Through our beloveds we can raise barns and children. We can weather funerals and farmers markets and lonely Father’s Days.

Yet, with this being true, we are also taught — and shown — that there is safety in isolation. That we must *~FiGuRe It OuT~* on our own. We play stealthy defense against receiving. We play games with giving and connecting. We make others into our projection screens, rather than allowing them to serve as our honest mirrors.

After a recent conversation, I decided to dedicate this summer to having a joyful childhood. The idea of it lit me up. I could teach myself to play and make sure I swam everyday. I could set — and enforce — a bedtime and also get Reese’s Puffs at the grocery store. Once the lit-up-ness wore away, though, I was filled with grief. It was the grief of hyper-independence. The stark loneliness of not knowing how to be childlike, and the knowledge that I owed it to myself to figure it out.

For our Ancestors, grief was drenched in ritual and ceremony. There was an opening to grief and her teachings. It seems the medicine to the grief of hyper-independence is to further open to others. To let yourself belong. To allow people to let you down and challenge you as they survive their own hyper-independence in the ways they know how. All we can ask of ourselves is to slowly and safely unravel the threads that tell us we are safer alone.

If it is of any hope, I let a group of friends know I would be having a childhood this summer. One of them offered to hold a coming of age ceremony for me at the end of it. The grief of hyper-independence is a creative, collective, communal force if you let it be. It can lead you to play. It can lead you back to yourself — held by the hands of those who love you.