a closet.

on a year of grief and living single.

I was about 9 years old when I started retreating to my bedroom closet in moments of emotional distress. In the house on Multnomah Street, I would tuck my body into the quiet. It was just large enough to contain me, and I liked it that way. The softness of the fabric hanging overhead caressed my braids, crowning them with a halo of frizz. The solidity of the three old built-in drawers supported my spine. A small rectangle of a window opened above them, facing my mother’s garden. It was too high for me to see out of, but the window offered a reminder of the reality of outside. The earth available to me should I choose to meet it. There was exactly enough floor space for me to sit – cross-legged, or on my heels, or with my knees bent and my soles on the carpet. Here I’d write Dear Diary and trust that Diary, whoever and wherever she was, could feel me in my sadness. I’d wrap my arms around myself and sway to the rhythm of my heartbeat. I’d whisper-sing the lyrics to my favorite Mariah Carey song. There’s a hero/if you look inside your heart/you don’t have to be afraid/ of what you are. I was the most alone I could be in there, and being alone was my reprieve. I didn’t have to be on, didn’t have to be good. I found safety in solitude.

Please know that, yes, I understand as a later in life coming out queer that me putting my actual body in the literal closet was outrageously on the nose.

I wouldn’t announce these closet moments to my family. I’d just wait for a break, when no one wanted or needed anything from me, and take my refuge. My big feelings felt too big, too messy for the house around me. So, I put them, and myself, away.

The coping strategy that kept me alive as a child has now become the habit I must unlearn if I’m to live the abundantly loved and loving life that I desire and deserve. The abundantly loved and loving life that I want for you, too.

I’ve gotten pretty good at asking for help with practical tasks. I’ve learned out of necessity how to ask for material support when my survival depends on it. But asking for help when I’m struggling emotionally? This is not a skill I naturally possess. My impulse is to assume that no one will be available, that no one will be able to withstand the intensity, that no one cares about me enough to hold me through my storms. I isolate. I withdraw to soothe myself, until I can emerge and be the good girl I’m expected to be for everyone else.

I’ve been blessed to have connections with people who reach out to check on me, knowing that I’m unlikely to make first contact – especially when I’m suffering. I’ve learned how to be honest with others about my pain when they ask. But what I haven’t quite figured out yet is how to be the person who says, hey friend, I’m hurting and I need you.

This is me practicing that now, in the hopes that it will support you in your practice. The community we recognize is so necessary to cultivate in these times will require us to develop our skills in how to both make and answer the call for care. And I’m much better at answering than I am at dialing.

For those of you who are available for others when they need their hearts held, but never learned how to proactively ask for the same, I offer my attempt with the intention that it helps you to feel validated in yours.

And, apparently, I’m also allowed to practice reaching out simply because it’s supportive to my own well being…? Like, not everything I do must be done with the explicit intention of benefitting others…? Wild if true!

Sweet community of folks who read my writing – some of whom I know and love in real life, some of whom I never have and perhaps never will meet – I’m here today to say that I have never cried as much as I have cried this year. I have never felt as alone and adrift as I have this year. I have experienced deep heartbreak before, but never like I have this year. As we enter the winter holiday season, I’m feeling an acute cumulative grief unlike anything I’ve ever known. And I’m not practiced in what it means to ask for someone who is not my romantic partner to show up for me, come through for me, hold my heart. But these words are my outstretched hand, asking you to bear witness. To sit with me.

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Some of you who know me may know that I’ve practiced non-monogamy in my romantic life since 2021. I felt drawn to this relationship structure for a handful of reasons. I wanted my partner at the time and I to be able to love each other while also being open to exploring connections with others with whom we could share aspects of ourselves and the human experience that weren’t available in our connection. I was also interested in non-monogamy as a manifestation of my rejection of capitalism. I wanted to release the notion of romantic love as ownership over another person and their relational life, to renounce my allegiance to the relationship escalator and the compulsory nuclear family structure. Ultimately, though, I was most interested in polyamory because I know that I have the capacity to love more than one person. Romantic love doesn’t feel like a finite resource to me. I hoped to experience in practice what I knew in my body – that my loving one person could never diminish my loving another. And I did.

I recognize that I’m oriented this way for all of these reasons, but I also imagine that my interest in non-monogamy was rooted in me craving multiple containers for intimacy at a depth that went beyond what my platonic friendships have held. It could be that I leaned into polyamory in part because it felt like the only way that I could love and be loved by more than one person who was as invested in me as I was in them. It could be that I thought I wanted multiple partners, when what I really needed was for my non-romantic relationships to feel as loving as my partnerships.

The capacity to love this way also holds the possibility of multiple heartbreaks, multiple endings. This year, I’ve moved through layers of grief from back-to-back endings of relationships with people with whom I imagined I would be in love for the rest of my life.

I began 2024 with a move to a new apartment after breaking up with a partner who has been my rock, my bestie, the person with whom I’ve felt safest in the world since I met him in 2018. As much as we loved each other, our misalignment about the futures we wanted for ourselves and the core values at the root of those visions brought us to a point of no return.

I had no time to process that grief before, in February, I experienced the ending of an almost one year-long relationship with the person with whom I first experienced Black femme for Black femme love. The person who shared my dream of communal living, spiritual practice, and healing work, who made me feel for the first time like I wouldn’t be alone because I wanted that life. Within the span of a month or so, she asked me for deeper commitment, told me to quit my job and leave the Bay with her so we could focus on co-creating our dream, backed out after I’d already quit and made plans to move, and unceremoniously broke up with me over the phone in the middle of her workday.

I grieve the lives I won’t live with each of them, the futures we won’t share.

I first learned of the term “ambiguous loss,” coined by Pauline Boss, as I healed from my divorce in 2015. I listened to Boss talk with Krista Tippett about the various ways that we lose people who may still be alive, just no longer present in our lives. How we hardly know how to hold grief in the face of the death of a loved one, and therefore can barely begin to touch it in the face of a living ghost.

I know that he still draws breath and walks the earth. I know that we will remain in each other’s lives as friends. I know that our love for each other is bigger than and not dependent on our status as romantic partners. I grieve the loss anyway.

I know that she still draws breath and walks the earth. I know that she will never be in my life again, a choice that I’ve made as a result of how I was treated and discarded by her. I grieve the loss anyway.

I know that I have friends, family, comrades, colleagues, collaborators who draw breath, walk the earth, and love me dearly. And they also have their own families, their own partners, their own relational networks to cultivate and maintain.

Being unpartnered means that I can’t expect anyone to prioritize me. It means that, at the end of the day, I find myself in the closet again, self-soothing as best I can.

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Our society is structured around the romantic relationship as the building block of home, of a sense of safety, connection, and belonging in the world. Even as so many of us have been in partnerships in which we weren’t safe, felt disconnected, didn’t belong, we’re still told that this path is the only way. We’re still told that we must fix our flaws and put ourselves out there again in order to, if we are lucky, be chosen by one person from whom we will receive all of these basic human needs.

I don’t know how to trust that I can be single and safe under capitalism. I don’t know how to trust that my being single will not leave me out of love.

In their 2016 essay “Romantic Love is Killing Us,” Caleb Luna writes about the experience of being “singled,” of knowing that there is care and intimacy that won’t be present for us unless we’re partnered. They write:

“When I think about the benefits of romantic partnerships as exhibited both in popular culture and my own observations via my friends’ romances, I recognize that these benefits are not purely financial or physical. They are about daily and mundane interpersonal interactions of reciprocity. In short: investment and care. The practice of investing in and caring enough for someone to incorporate them into your life in such significant ways that their presence begins to feel necessary, if not compulsive. When I say singled, I mean the position of being denied intimacy and care from those in my life who reserve it for others. But this does not have to be tied to romance. I find that these are the things I crave more than romance per se. The security to count on someone to take care of me when I’m sick. To care for me in a crisis. To share sadness and joy with me. This care does not have to be reserved, but we seem to have culturally agreed to distribute it selectively, and only to those we are in romantic partnerships with. I received these things from platonic relationships when I was younger, but as I get older and more and more of my friends enter serious relationships, it is less and less frequent to the point of being almost non-existent. Perhaps as we become less and less naïve, or more guarded from more years of hurt, or more exhausted from more years in the work force, we have less energy to dispense and are more careful of where we do so. Nonetheless, participation in these, what I am choosing to call, economies of care impacts us and has consequences.”

I recognize my complicity in this selective distribution. It has looked like not asking anyone who isn’t my partner to practice building mutual, daily investment and care with me. It has looked like assuming that mutual, daily investment and care will only be there from people who are romantically and sexually attracted to me. It has looked like retreating and isolating, rather than stepping outside of the closet and taking the risk of asking to be held. It’s painful to come to terms with the role I’ve played in arriving at a moment in which my body is begging for someone to hold me as I cry, and I don’t know who to call. I’m not even sure that I could bring myself to call if I did. The people I would have called were my partners. But they can’t hold me through the grief of our ambiguous loss, and I wouldn’t ask them to.

I’m trying every day to find a balance between offering to myself the care that I’ve received in partnerships, opening up to receiving more care from platonic loved ones, and accepting the reality that, until we restructure our ways of relating and organizing society, we won’t receive the intimacy, affection, and sustained support that we need in the absence of romantic love. There’s only so much that I can offer myself each day as a neurodivergent and mentally ill person. In our current paradigm, there’s no dream of a life I can hold that doesn’t involve a partner – not just because I’m someone who desires romantic love, but because there is, under capitalism, no way that I can live well without a partner with whom I’m mutually invested in shared survival. In a world in which we’re taught that a romantic partner is the person with whom we do life, how do I know that I will be able to do life if I’m living single?

They were mutually invested in each other! They prioritized each other! They had safety, connection, and belonging with each other! Ah, to have your homegirls standing to your left and your right! True blue and tight like glue!

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The grief of this year broke me open in such a way that I either had to face myself, or I was going to die. It was the kind of pain that either kills you or changes the course of the rest of your life. Thankfully, I’m here. And I’m changing. The fact that I can write this is evidence.

I can’t know for sure that romantic partnership will find me again, have no assurance that I will connect with another person in this way again. Even if it happens, I can’t count on it lasting for the rest of my days. What I can count on - finally, and only through my surviving the wreckage that was 2024 - is my own commitment to coming out of the closet.

My therapist led me through a visualization exercise a couple of months ago in which I went back to the closet. I opened the door, and I was met with a wall of cobwebs and dust bunnies. I moved them out of the way, and there she was. That little girl. So scared, so alone. She thought that she would be scared and alone forever. She thought she had been left for dead. I scooped her up in my arms. I opened the window. I registered her relief as she felt the incoming air and light on her skin. Because I was holding her up, she could finally see out of that window. I witnessed the smile that crept across her face as she gazed at the roses. She asked me if we could go outside.

If not for this year’s heartbreak, I don’t know how much longer it would have taken for me to go back and open that door. If not for this year’s pain, I don’t know how much longer it would have taken for me to feel safe enough to step out into the garden. If not for this year’s grief, I don’t know how much longer it would have taken for me to recognize that, if I truly desire a world in which all of us have all that we need, I must learn how to practice trusting that there are people who love me - whether or not it’s romantic love - and will choose to build a life of daily mutual care and investment with me. That living single doesn’t have to mean living alone.