I’m in a daily writing workshop this month. We are given prompts. This one was about loneliness. I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I’d repost here what I wrote during the workshop. At the end are responses I got from other writers in the workshop.
Photographer/Writer: Tribute: Cocker Power
Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck. I could fill this whole page with this feeling of Fuck Fuck Fuck – was I a loner? What a question to come to so early in the morning when I’m already filled with tears from these past 9 mornings of truth writing. Without a doubt! I’ve always felt like a loner, even on a crowded stage. A loner surrounded by people, by attention, by audiences. By focused attention from my parents. A fucking only child, I am, who’s tried to fit in forever. Try that! Being an only child. It sentences one to be a loner. Sure, it’s great now for umpteen million reasons – one, I inherit everything. No siblings to share with. No siblings to fight over the scraps with. I got all the love singly pointed towards me all my life by two loving parents who didn’t deserve how I took out my pain on them. I also got all the expectations, provided all the kid-joys and troubled-child, all the expectations and the financial support. I was a fucking only child, never really understanding the other kids because whoa there were no other kids around me to practice being human with. It stood me alone in school, it built me, it was me. ME. The singularity of ME. Just the whole ball of wax, all ME. Always about ME. Me me me me me. Always the focus at home, never left alone, yet always alone. I could cry for all the loneliness I went through, the existential loneliness of the only child. I do cry about it still today. It’s a fucking LONELY feeling that feels like it has to be filled constantly. At first, I filled it with food. For decades in fact – let’s just say the majority of my life I overate trying to fill that existential emptiness inside me with food. Binging, but never purging; just building up such tension in my body, such unhealthy fullness in my stomach, but only able to cry until the pain subsided. It hurt to be that full of food, sure, but the hurt that hurt the most was that well of loneliness that nothing could fill. It was the well I fell in over and over as the pain built up inside me. Maybe I overate and purged every 2 months or 3 weeks, I honestly don’t remember. It was my drug of choice until later which I can’t remember because it feels like I crawled out of that body, that spirit that overate to not feel that pain only recently – maybe 8-10 years ago in fact is when I slipped the insides of me out, leaving my skin and organs, my self-love honed slowly over decades of being a mother, and my beautiful soul and spirit that was always there waiting for me to become my own beloved. Ayahuasca was the transitional medicine that finally dissolved my craving to fill myself with enough food not to feel the pain of existential loneliness. One night, with my beautiful daughter by my side as my companion, my beautiful Heather whose birth started my healing process in earnest, with heather lying next to me holding my hand in the darkness as I purged and purged for the entire group of us there in the darkness, I was the chosen one, the one to purge for the group. I was the gifted one the Shaman must have intuited needed just this healing. He never told me not to eat dinner. And so, laying there dying to the spirit I had been, I prayed to the spirits in that inner hell to please not kill me. I did not want to die. And after the purging stopped and all the blackness in my belly had been delivered into the bucket, I lay back on my mat as the Shaman left my side, the smoke he continually blew in my direction dissipated and with my beautiful daughter asleep next to me, I time travelled gently back into myself, knowing I would never overeat again. I had vomited all the blackness into the pail – all the blackness of decades of self-hatred for being “fat,” for being “not enough,” for being lonely, for not looking like my mother, the blond and beautiful fashion model. And I knew I would never overeat again. I would fill my body with sparkling jewels of self-love, I would carry my tears and my scars and regrets and wounds and the existential loneliness of the only child without ever overeating again. It was a clear, crisp early morning walk home with Heather to Hollyhock.
When people look at me in old photographs, they would never know I’d been so tormented by food. I was beautiful. During my years of rock royalty, I was lovely and wanted, and had a beautiful body. I had attracted the most beautiful of beautiful musicians, dated them, was their girlfriend, made love with them, was included in their entourages. I was smart enough to have an ax, my camera. I wouldn’t need to be a sidelined groupie, I was part of the show, I was part of the band. I was the band’s photographer. I was in the in-crowd. I fucked whoever I wanted, and I chose who I wanted. But, in private I overate and purged – not by throwing up, I couldn’t make myself do that. I tried --all I did was gag. No, it was by eating 1000 calories a day for as long as I could until the tension built up again, and I had to binge and cry. The binging hurt but the crying released the days and weeks prior when I held myself together so no one would see how insecure I was, how hurt I was, how lonely I was even though I was part of the in-crowd.
Being photographer for the band was being in the band but not really IN the band. I could have been a musician, but I didn’t practice piano enough when I was young or I would have been in the first all-girl rock band, Fanny. I was meant to be in the band, that was obvious when I met the girls at WB/Reprise, where I had just become a secretary – even though I couldn’t type or take shorthand. But I looked good, and I faked it just as good. I could have been in the band prior to that when I was living at Paxton Lodge with my drummer boyfriend for Jackson Browne that time we all lived up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains bankrolled by Elektra Records – (sounds impressive, doesn’t it) but I had not practiced piano enough as a child. I was too interested in being outside, playing with the other kids. I wasn’t Linda Ronstadt. I wasn’t Judy Collins, I was not Joannie Mitchell – I was Linda Wolf, deep, poetic, smart, sensitive, into music, but the devil had me in her grip – I was a closet overeater. And overeaters are those who, in my opinion, are disconnected from their truth and have to keep it very secret. The truth, my truth was that I was a lonely, only child who didn’t understand the socialization secrets kids learn when they have siblings. Plus, I was an only child with a child mother, whose size, shape, blond hair and need for attention trumped mine. A mother who was so young and beautiful that when my boyfriends came to the door to pick me up and she opened it, their eyes bulged and couldn’t be shifted from her in her bathing suit to me. She was the epitome of beautiful -- the young MILF, the ex-fashion model, the bottle blond with straight hair – beautiful, charmingly smart Barbara, and I was the Zoftig brown curly haired daughter, Tarzan’s daughter, a tomboy who swung from the trees.
Now, at 73 years old, I never overeat. I haven’t for 10 years, since that night on Cortes Island with my beautiful daughter, my guide to my true self, the one who can hold all the pain of all that I did to myself in private, now I’m free of that monkey on my back. Now, at 73 years old, after years of taking care of and forgiving and loving my beautiful mother through her last painful years, I can write my story. I may not have the language my English teacher mother was capable of delivering in her writing and I may not have read the many great books she’d read and taught as a high school English teacher ( she died ½ way through reading Homo Deus) but in my own words, I can speak now and I intend to. I intend to tell my story – because it is a powerful story. It is not only a story of my life as a rock & roll photographer, but it is more importantly a story of one hurt person’s trip through self-healing, helped along by unseen forces and so much love. This writing here with Unmuted is practice for my memoir, which I’m jokingly calling my Menoir, due to all the boyfriend cobblestones on my yellow brick road. I haven’t fully grokked that I’m worth a memoir at this point. But I am still recognized as rock royalty, for goodness sake!
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Responses:
Amy: Wow Linda. You were such a ground breaker… and still are. A woman rock n roll photographer (BTW, loved Joe Cocker), a healed person from overeating, past traumas, and loneliness, and now you are groundbreaking in your writing for us. Tell your truth! I will buy your memoir.
Jan: I loved everything about this: the honesty, the integrity, the raw gut-wrenching imagery, the deep inner guidance coming through to let the narrator see the truth of who she is. Here are lines that touched me.
it feels like I crawled out of that body, that spirit that overate to not feel that pain only recently – maybe 8-10 years ago in fact is when I slipped the insides of me out, leaving my skin and organs, my self-love honed slowly over decades of being a mother, and my beautiful soul and spirit that was always there waiting for me to become my own beloved.
I would fill my body with sparkling jewels of self-love, I would carry my tears and my scars and regrets and wounds and the existential loneliness of the only child without ever overeating again. It was a clear, crisp early morning walk home with Heather to Hollyhock.
The binging hurt but the crying released the days and weeks prior when I held myself together so no one would see how insecure I was, how hurt I was, how lonely I was even though I was part of the in-crowd.
Henry: This write made me go back and look at Youtube videos of Cocker’s performances and realize again how putting yourself out on display can be so painful, and yet that’s what it takes to make great art no matter what. To take chances, to give it your all, to be in pain, to move through the pain, to face yourself as you are, to maybe love it, maybe hate it, but ultimately to make peace with it. It took me back to my own youth in the 70s, to how we all come to terms with who we were, who are or aren’t, who we wish we had been and who we want to be and that fact that one day we won’t be anything at all. Thanks for this. It took me places I never expected to go today.
Edna: Holy Moly, Linda. I am really glad you aren’t filling the space inside you with too much food because the hugeness inside you is filled with rich images and words that just keep flowing out and refilling again. You are gulping in this workshop and I am delighted to be a witness.
Kate: LOVE the photograph, especially its caption, drawing the reader in immediately. Love the unpretentious, genuine voice of the narrator. Love the deeply engaging story, its swift pace, compelling details, unabashedly honest confessions. You are writer royalty & I can’t wait to read your book!
Another amazing poem Linda. I can so relate. And am sharing this. Thank you and you are LOVED. And if anyone calls me a Warrior again, I feel like slapping them. And FUCK FUCKER FUCK were my first words kicking the party bottles, cans, ashtrays around when we lived out at Ocean Beach in the City. Of course I also said NO. Loneliness......I'm 65 years old. And this is the first time I have felt so lonely. I miss my family and most are all gone to Nirvana.
Responses: If there is such a thing ~ You’ve come full circle Linda ⭕️! In other words, you’ve come to love yourself, like we all deserve Linda… You’ve gone to battle with your inner self, and came out on top… We’ve really have made the most of you time, at least I think so, and I’m guessing you enjoyed much about those experiences too! We all have demons of sorts, and you have conquered yours, and are the better for having done so 👏🏻‼️ Life is full of challenges and obstacles that have a lot to say as to where we end up down the road ~ The rewards are never ending when we open our eyes to our heart and soul🌹🌅❣️