Electrons + Loneliness
“In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.” — Carlo Rovelli
Doubled over, one hand on my right knee and the other on the corner of the cold, metallic operating table, I gasped for air between sobs.
As my friend Jonathan put it, it’s a lot like a community theater performance of someone crying. Like you’re howling so intensely that someone observing it might think you were making fun of someone else who was crying.
Funny only because of how vividly you can imagine that scene, how accurately it speaks to the experience, and also because it’s not really funny at all.
I’d just watched my cat Simon slowly slip away from me, stiffening in the borrowed cat bed from the vet’s office after a prolonged and traumatic battle between him and three staff members trying to poke his back leg with a sedative under a full-sized duvet for their protection. A battle that robbed me of any chance to safely hold him before he was actually gone. A small comfort stolen from our relationship and any sense of closure I wanted for us.
After they finally injected the sedative, I watched, alone, curled up on the floor next to him, wailing at how pained he looked even if the doctor assured me otherwise—his body contorted a bit freakishly, left arm trapped backward under him, after he’d lost mobility and I couldn’t fix it for fear of causing pain—and how much faster I wanted this to be over for him. Embarrassingly dramatic, I stepped into the hallway and half-shouted for the the vet, insisting we end things for Simon as soon as possible so he wouldn’t suffer.
It was not the peaceful exit I’d imagined after months of emotional and practical preparation.
And, as much as seeing a grown woman sob on a sterile floor next to her dying companion of 14 years is probably universally common for everyone in the vet’s office, it felt specifically singular to me and my own life.
Grief always does.
The look on his face now seared into my memory. Images that have begun haunting my brain when falling asleep, replaying mentally in the gaps between all my distractions: podcast episode listening, packing up for my impending move, or a new comedy special to help me forget the terror of it for just a bit.
It was the moment, though, doubled over from my staccato weeping—when the technicians had left the room and he had finally passed—that I suddenly felt the space around me. How goddamned alone I felt in the moment. This creature who’d been at my side for so long, now gone. The vets, just strangers doing their job, disappeared. No partner whimpering with me. No cat to greet me when I returned home and had to walk his things down to the dumpster myself or donate his leftover food to the local humane society. No human to hold or animal to cuddle the next morning.
Nothing and no one there to observe the pain of it all, in person.
Just huge, cavernous, pockets of space and air.
A cloud of emptiness.
In this empty space, as you might even be familiar, my brain inserts a narrative about who I am in the world:
Isolated.
Alone.
Broken.
Unattractive.
Unwanted.
Incapable of connection or intimacy.
Rejected in all my softest, vulnerable places.
Many circumstances built and continue to maintain this narrative over time:
An only child.
The daughter of one mother who couldn’t stay.
The step-daughter of another who couldn’t leave alcohol alone.
Profound and extended periods of singleness.
Inconsistent and broken friendships.
I could continue, but you get the point.
Sometime last year, a bodyworker opened our first craniosacral session together by saying that she saw how little of my life had been “witnessed.” How we used to live in tribes or communities where witnessing was a huge part of life, but how this is no longer the case, and how much this absence has marked my experience.
I couldn’t move from the fetal position on my couch for two hours after returning home.
Back in 2017, I posted a photo on Instagram of something I’d written in my journal while reading my first Carlo Rovelli book:
“Electrons literally don’t exist when they’re not interacting with something else. They’re relational. We can only observe them when they’re in relationship to something else. Is this why loneliness is so devastating? Are we not fundamentally built to be in relationship to others? Is this why we can scientifically prove that isolation kills us?”
I remember hearing from Laurie Santos and Brené Brown about how medically harmful isolation is for humans. “Worse than two packs a day,” I think it was.
I remember reading Rupa Marya and Raj Patel write about how autoimmunity is a mirror for the way that culture behaves: war, and violence, and separation being mirrored back in our bodies. The way we see something else as an invader we must keep from crossing our “borders,” constantly trying to stay separate for fear of illness, only to cause disease in ourselves. We spend so long naming everything else as “other” that our own bodies become “other” to us.
For a long time, I saw all of this data as justification for my experience of loneliness. How truly painful it was to feel alone—emotional agony as damaging as physical agony.
The metaphor of an electron seemed to work. A fractal of the quantum world reflecting the macro world.
Unless it’s witnessed, it’s merely a possibility.
But it left me feeling ungrounded, untethered to existence. Like the “tree falling in a forest” bit: if no one ever sees my life happen, did it ever? Just a floating probability, never smashing into anything else. If I’m not observed, then what am I?
Over the years, though, as my knowledge of the ecological world has grown and my understanding of “separation” has changed, I’ve come to see this way of thinking as a cultural manifestation of separation, in and of itself.
Meaning, perhaps a big reason I’ve come to see my existence as “isolated” is because the Western view of life is, itself, an ideology of separation. It ignores the fact that, in an ecological framework, I am constantly being witnessed because I am in constant interpenetration, and aliveness, and relationship with everything around me. I am constantly transforming and being transformed by my environment. I am as observed by the grass I’m walking near as I am observing the grass. My food is constantly becoming me, and I am constantly becoming food for others.
The goal, then, might only be to become more edible.
To be in an erotic experience of life.
To see love as constantly everywhere, happening all the time, in all its tragic and gorgeous unfolding.
Even in death.
Maybe most especially in death.
I could no more be separated or isolated from reality and existence—cut off from community—than the rain trickling down my balcony right now or the birds that wake me every morning at dawn. I am as in relationship with sunlight as I would be with any partner.
Is this not the indigenous take on polyamory?
I am polyamorous because I am in relationship of varying hierarchies and arrangements with absolutely everything around me. I am polyamorous because I am, “alone,” in my own being (if there even is such a thing), a body made up of community—cells, viruses, yeasts, bacteria, and more, and love is the energetic act we all engage in collectively each day.
Love is the energy driving it all.
But love does not solve the problem of death or contradiction; it only deepens it.
As Andreas Weber wrote:
From an ecological perspective, love is a practice of balancing interests that lead to a state of greater aliveness while also accepting failure in advance. A successful attachment always has two sides: living without fear, and learning to die courageously.
Love is an answer to the lack that lies at the heart of aliveness, but it does not compensate for that lack—it transforms it. Love transforms that lack into an excess that produces new contradictions; it is the luminous chasm and the ephemeral mass, freedom in impossibility, the always insufficient answer to the paradox of life:
”vivacidad pura” (Octavio Paz)—pure aliveness, experienced from inside the world.
It’s interesting to me, too, that in my recent work, where I’ve dipped my toes into the world of quantum health, that electrons have now taken on an even new quality.
It turns out, in the body, an abundance of electrons is a key indicator of aliveness itself. When your body has a lot of electrons it is less prone to disease. Having more electrons means you have more aliveness.
And isn’t that wild?
A cloud of emptiness is a cloud of possibility.
It is one side of the electrical charge of life.
An emptiness that powers the world.
Nothingness = Everything-ness.
This is not, of course, to spiritually bypass the experience of loneliness, or even to counter any evidence about its impacts on our health.
It is, however, a call—to myself more than anyone else—to remember that the impacts might be less severe if I looked beyond human kin as the only statement on my worthiness, my abundance, or intimacy in my life.
It’s a reminder that I am nature.
It’s a poetic acknowledgement that, if “intimacy is a union of particles,” then I am expert at intimacy because I am here. A mix of particles constantly fusing and mingling with other particles.
I belong because I am alive.
And, it’s a comfort in knowing that Simon’s particles, wherever they have transitioned to, are also, always, being held.
Related Reading & Listening
If you want to feel at least slightly better about the ache of human existence—the unfulfilling project of always looking for an “Object A”—this is one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time. I turned to it again last week when I needed reminding that nothing and no one will ever resolve my inner conflict and that ridding the world of all its “baddies” won’t fix anything. In fact, mathematics, physics, and philosophy only prove that paradox is the nature of reality…and this is a good thing.
Kim Tallbear was the first person to help me consider that I wasn’t as “monogamous” as I thought, and that “polyamory” was a more accurate way to describe my orientation to the world. (Perhaps the more accurate description of all of us.)
I think we’re each a single prismatic slice of sunlight, experiencing what it’s like to feel separate before returning back to wholeness. Or, something like that?