(ThySistas.com) Emotional isolation rarely announces itself in an empty room. Most times it moves into a household stacked with noise and laundry and folks who would swear on a Bible that they adore you.
This goes out to the wife who feels more like a co manager than a partner in her own marriage. The mama running three schedules besides her own belongs here too. So does the daughter sorting her mother’s pill organizer on a Sunday evening after service, and the sorority sister, the usher, the coworker everybody phones when the department catches fire. You are surrounded. Somehow you are also, quietly, on your own.
Here is what nobody prepared us for. Being needed and being known are two separate accounts, and most of us are wealthy in one and badly overdrawn in the other. Your family knows what you do. They can locate the good scissors because you told them where they live. Insurance renewals, birthdays, and the awkward phone call to Aunt Ruth all land on your side of the ledger. What none of them could tell you is what frightened you last month, or why you sat in the driveway for eleven minutes before walking inside.
Somewhere between our grandmothers’ kitchens and our own, competence became a costume nobody taught us to remove. Strength got confused with silence. We were praised for carrying, so we carried, and the applause taught us that setting anything down would cost us the only identity anyone had ever celebrated in us. Now we are pushing fifty, everybody leans, and nobody checks.
Marriage can go quiet without going bad. Two decent adults wake up one morning speaking fluent logistics. Pick up, drop off, did you pay it, who is driving. Affection survives in the shape of a gas tank filled without anyone asking. Nothing is broken enough to fix, which is exactly why it never gets fixed. Meanwhile you are starving at a table set for two.
Children love you the way weather loves a mountain, constantly and thoroughly and without ever wondering how the mountain is holding up. That is developmentally appropriate. It is also isolating in a way that surprises women who waited years to become mothers. A teenager can hug you each day of her life and never ask one question about who you were before she arrived.
Then comes the calendar, our most respectable hiding place. Book club Tuesday, board meeting Thursday, bridal shower Saturday, choir rehearsal in between. Show up smelling good, laugh in the right places, hug forty necks, drive back to an address where the ache sits waiting like a cat. Attendance at events is not intimacy. We have been confusing the two for decades.
Ask any of us how we are doing and watch scripture turn into armor. Blessed and highly favored. Can’t complain. God is good. Every word true, all of it lovely, and each one deployed at the exact speed of somebody who decided long ago not to be a burden to anyone. Testimony was never meant to function as a muzzle.
Social media offers a counterfeit so convincing you can go years without noticing the swap. Two hundred birthday messages. Thirty laughing emojis under your niece’s graduation post. A group thread that pings from morning until midnight. Then a Tuesday arrives when your mammogram comes back needing a second look, and you scroll through every contact in that phone unable to decide who deserves the call. Right there is your diagnosis.
Researchers have spent the last two decades documenting links between chronic disconnection and higher blood pressure, poorer sleep, inflammation, and cognitive decline. Our bodies can carry stress our mouths refuse to name. Black women already face disproportionate burdens of hypertension and short sleep, and chronic loneliness may be one part of the larger stress load behind the numbers our doctors read back to us.
Now for the uncomfortable portion. Some of the invisibility we resent, we trained. Each occasion when somebody asked how you were doing and you handed them a commercial instead of the truth, you taught them that the question was rhetorical. The friend who offered help and got girl please, I got it in return eventually learned to stop offering. I have done this myself. Last spring, in fact. My oldest friend since college found out through Facebook that my father had a stroke.
So what does a grown woman actually do, starting this week.
Say the sentence out loud to one human being. Not a caption, not a prayer journal, an actual face across an actual table. I feel unseen and I cannot remember how long that has been true. Notice that the ceiling stays right where it is.
Request something specific. Vague sorrow gets vague responses, while instructions get results. With your husband, try twenty minutes on the porch, phones inside, and two questions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the children. Ask your grown son for a phone call on Sundays that centers his life rather than a box he checks.
Choose one friend and get consistent. Same day, same hour, no agenda, no potluck, no theme. That kind of ordinary reliability builds trust that a beautifully catered brunch simply cannot.
Retire from auditioning. The role of Woman Who Never Struggles pays terribly and the run has no closing night. Let somebody see you tired. Whoever exits was audience rather than family, and honestly you needed that information.
Consider therapy, particularly with a professional who understands the cost of performing excellence while grieving. Many of our mothers had far less access to that option, and plenty of them paid for it in ways we watched up close.
Learn the difference between solitude and abandonment. Sitting alone on your patio at six in the morning with coffee and zero obligations is medicine. A den crowded with relatives where you feel like furniture is a wound. One of those you choose. The other chooses you.
None of this makes you difficult or ungrateful. Loving your husband and missing the way he used to court you can occupy the same afternoon. Pride in your children coexists easily with mourning the person you were before they showed up. You can cherish your church, your line sisters, your job, and your mother, and still need one soul on this earth who knows precisely what frightens you.
A full residence and a full heart are separate accomplishments. Wanting both does not make you greedy, and saying so out loud does not make you weak. Say it anyway, at fifty two, standing in your kitchen, to somebody who will actually hear you.
Start there. Tonight, if you can manage it.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.