Are there some stories that are best left untold? In this essay, American expat BJ Stolbov recounts a decades-old experience which—until now— had remained private.
All tagged isolation
The Opposite of Loneliness: How travel transforms the experience of solitude and staying home.
Thirty-seven days into self-isolation Ellen Barone asked her husband Hank, “Are you lonely?” Like much of the world’s population, they are physical-distancing and staying home to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Would this, she worried, lead to loneliness? And, in turn, to biological effects as deadly as the virus itself? Instead, isolation has brought clarity to something they’d innately suspected all along.
Isolation in the Time of Pandemic
With a successful gallery business shuttered by COVID-19, Susanna Starr muses on adaptation, aging, and life in isolation in northern New Mexico.
I used to be an extrovert.
Now, I consider myself an introvert with some extrovert added to the mix. I have a hearing loss. One ear is deaf and the other partially deaf. I feel like I have an invisible veil separating me from others.
Two years ago, after struggling to hear with friends, travelers, servers, family, salespeople,I checked into getting hearing aids. Each time, I felt frustration as technicians told me: “they should work.” They did not work for me. It began a path towards partial isolation and frustration.
I visited specialists at Kaiser, my medical group After test results, my doctor said, “You have a brain tumor which has damaged your auditory nerve."
“Hearing aids won’t help.”
“What?” My mind raced to thoughts of my grandfather who died of brain cancer. The doctor continued, “Good news: it is not cancer. Bad news: Permanent hearing loss with residual symptoms.”