Ms. Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.Looking for HomePart 1 of 2Life is precarious, to say the least. We are all born into a world where, from our first breath to our last, we are challenged to find food, shelter, and clothing for our basic survival. In the midst of this basic challenge, we also seek meaning and relationship. We all want a sense of purpose in life, a meaningful existence. At the same time we do not usually choose to seek lifes meaning in isolation. Most of us prefer to be with people, to share our lives, to help each other, though not to take away from our private moments. Simply put, we spend our lives attempting to stay meaningfully and socially involved in the midst of our struggle to survive. To be involved in this way is to feel at home in the world. It is true that food, shelter, and clothing are what a home (in the physical sense) usually represents. But we are talking here about the quality of life, not just its survival aspect. One can be homeless even in the midst of lifes necessities. My own life is a personal history of inner and outer homelessness, even in the midst of the necessary food, shelter, and clothing. In the eyes of the world, I was always very fortunate. But in my own eyes I was always very poor. I felt lonely and disconnected from everyone and even questioned my sense of purpose in life. Somehow I did not fit in. I really felt I had no home at all. My homelessness expressed itself in a variety of ways. I remember how, as a six-year-old child, I used to take solitary walks in the woods, finding more meaning and companionship among the trees and flowers than among my peers. Movies and then television, even books, have all served as an escape from a lonely and meaningless existence. As I grew older, this attitude persisted. Throughout my school years I was very lonely and generally uncomfortable with life. Upon entering the work world, which simultaneously included graduate school attendance, I continued to feel this way, all of which had a negative impact upon my work and studies. I knew that I was troubled, but I could not really explain my inner unrest. I knew that, from the time I was twelve or thirteen years old, I had been having a variety of sexual fantasies, fantasies and behaviors which were becoming a preoccupation, for they helped me to feel more and more comfortable in an increasingly alien world. At the same time I felt a great deal of shame and guilt about my private pleasures, usually involving cross dressing and masturbation. My shame and guilt became so great that, shortly after graduating from college, I decided to see a psychiatrist, the first of several. But my therapists all made me feel that having fantasies, especially sexual ones, and especially fulfilled ones, was bad. In fact, I was led to believe that anything I did which was significantly different from some kind of norm in society was an acting out of unproductive and even self-negating impulses. I was told that I was twisting myself out of shape. Of course, who is to say what the correct shape is? But I was not a danger to anyone, not even to myself. I just wanted to be myself, even if that self was somehow different from what others thought I should be. So I kept my fantasies and my feelings of shame and guilt a secret from my therapists, just as I had always kept them a secret from my own parents. Instead, we talked about my mother and my father and about my tendency to intellectualize my feelings, even though the therapeutic process itself seemed to be an intellectualization of my life. I really wanted my therapists to ask me nonjudgmental questions which would reveal, and therefore unburden me from, my troublesome feelings and inner turmoil. Perhaps even more, I wanted a hug, or at least the feeling of a human relationship. I wanted what I had neverreceived at home with my parents. Instead, I felt as homeless in the psychiatrists office as I did everywhere else. So what does one do in a case like that? I could not even buy the semblance of a home, that is, a human home, not even for an hour at a time. I continued to feel quite alone with my inner struggle and outer isolation. A poem, called Loneliness, which I wrote during this period of my life, helps to express my inner and outer homelessness and thus the pain of what I was experiencing: Loneliness stalks me (Next time I will talk about my way out of inner and outer homelessness.) Want to comment? Send email to Dr. Etscovitz at hmdm@voicenet.com |
© 1996 by Human Dimensions