UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB

When I think of the word “retreat,” my mind most often conjures up the noun—my imagination meanders over rolling hills to colonial manors, always painted white, surrounded by luscious grounds that include a requisite renovated barn or two, all miniaturized by a long winding driveway—the kind of place with a sordid yet inspiring history, where Emily Dickinson herself could have locked an attic door, blocking out the world in order to scribble in a manic state.

I think of it in context of the self-run writers’ retreats on Fire Island that have renewed and refreshed me over the years, visualizing red wagons on dirt paths, roaming deer, driftwood yard sculptures, and a long strip of windy beaches stretching out endlessly in both directions. And hours and hours of uninterrupted writing. The word connotes creative energy, a sense of calm, and the luxury of time to dedicate oneself to one’s craft. It implies an escape from external distractions and a return to the self, a positive journey of rejuvenation and recovery. A refuge, a getaway, a safe haven where the mind and soul can roam free.

These are the definitions that danced in my head a couple of years ago when my husband Niklas and I began discussing the life-upending idea of moving from New York City to the outskirts of Nashville to buy a fixer-upper that we would convert to an artists’ retreat, targeted toward small groups of writers, artists, and musicians. We planned to design and renovate it ourselves—as we had done in our Manhattan apartment on a much smaller scale—and we felt our scattered skill set might just make our dream doable.

Niklas is a jack-of-all-trades with a background in lighting design and building rigs for events and concerts, experienced in project management, while I had run a creative collective in the East Village for five years. He is a self-taught musician, I have a fine art background, and we both dabble in oil painting and photography. All of this led us to believe this would be something we could do together to ignite our passions and bring joy to others: sharing our space, sharing our love of art.

For the two decades I’d lived in the city, I couldn’t imagine leaving it. But now that my husband and I had reached middle age and were looking for a way to extract more meaning from our lives, I was open to the idea. I was tired of the street noise penetrating our apartment, the tension from outside seeping through the windows and into my bones. People yelling into their cellphones seemed to assault me personally, forcing me to feel their anger vicariously—and I didn’t want my senses exposed to this type of aggressive soundscape any longer.

This is when I began to think of the word retreat as a verb: the act of moving back and withdrawing.

I’d been sober for a few years, and so my lifestyle had already changed dramatically, and I knew a little something about retreating: from the bars, the booze, the bullshit. I had begun to practice social distancing before it became a common word in our vernacular. In fact, I was growing tired of the very things I had been drawn to when I first moved to the East Village at the bright-eyed age of twenty-seven. We were more domestic, spending most evenings cooking, watching movies, and cuddling with our dachshund. I was becoming almost hermit-like in my little hovel, retreating into my home, then retreating further inward. I began to work on myself, seeing a therapist, and on his recommendation tried guided meditation using an app, which surprisingly, I enjoyed and found effective. I’d take long walks in Central Park and realized that hiking the trails in the deep woods—even the smell of soil—brought me a kind of primal joy. I suddenly yearned to be surrounded by nature, enveloped in shades of green, to look up and have a wide horizon of blue to rest my eyes on, rather than catching broken slivers of sky between buildings. I wanted to have land to stand on, to steady myself. I was looking for a different experience and a new adventure, if a quieter one.

This past autumn we finally felt the timing was right for our big move. After years of saving, we had enough for a down payment, my debut novel had come out in the spring, and Niklas had served his time at his job for almost five years and felt he could comfortably give notice. We visited Nashville in mid-October and fell in love with a split-level fixer-upper on five acres in Ashland City, thirty minutes northwest of Nashville. It was quirky, with large spaces begging to be shared, and the property included an enclosed covered bridge that we hoped to convert to rentable, livable art studios.

But it was the sound that sold me. When I stepped out of the car to the secluded oasis, I heard silence, or what I thought was silence, for a split second. Once my ears adjusted, I heard a brook babbling and birds chirping and chattering. Looking down across the sloping lawn, surrounded by rolling hills covered in thick foliage on all sides, there was only one other neighbor in sight. When I walked through the house, I felt a wonderful energy and thought selfishly: I could write here. The brightness of the light pouring into the sunroom was almost blinding. The deck was bigger than my first apartment in Manhattan. In contrast to our current apartment in Harlem, where the one tree in view that peeked past our third story window was leafless for two-thirds of the year, this felt like a lush paradise.

Our offer was accepted, and when the property was officially ours in December, we put our Manhattan apartment on the market. Fortunately an offer came in quickly, but growing restless waiting for the closing date to be set, we moved to Ashland City on February 16th, and signed the closing paperwork remotely on February 28th.

One day later, on February 29th, the first coronavirus death in the country was reported. By March 15th, two coronavirus deaths were reported in NYC, and on March 20th Cuomo issued the shelter-in-place for all New Yorkers. As the virus spread many states followed suit and by March 30th, 265 million Americans were on some form of stay- at-home orders—including our recently adopted state of Tennessee.

At first it felt surreal. I remember hearing about a possible pandemic in January, and admittedly, I thought it was probably nothing more than an overreaction to fear-driven headlines, that it would likely not even reach out shores. But as I saw the events unfolding on the West Coast through a friend’s feed in real time on Facebook, I began to pay closer attention. Another friend was trapped in Italy and couldn’t fly home, and I watched what was happening in that part of the world. Then when the death toll began to rise in New York City, it felt real, it became personal, and we began to grasp the gravity of the situation.

The word retreat amped up for me, became an active verb, took on a more intense timbre with panicky undertones.

Only when we could look back from a future point could we begin to understand how incredibly lucky we were in the timing, and for the first six weeks or so I felt almost guilty in the tranquility I found in our new surroundings while so many were suffering. While the weather was still chilly we made fires every night in the fireplace and felt very present, very alive in our new home. I couldn’t help feeling a thrill in walking around the property, watching it come alive in early spring. Plants and weeds emerged that I hadn’t seen since childhood, and I was surprised to find I still knew the words for them. I watched wildflowers fill the yard, seemingly overnight, followed by a world of winged insects. Several sets of finch families lived in our new ferns, and discovering first their tiny nest, then their tiny eggs, then the baby birds was strangely comforting as I observed the natural order of things—in stark contrast to the fear I felt watching the news.

We felt incredibly grateful that since we had planned to spend the year working on our renovations, we were mostly unaffected. Niklas and I busied ourselves with manual labor, painting, and laying tiles, finding the repetitive motion therapeutic in blocking out frightening news cycles and uncertain futures. I worried about my single friends trapped in their shoebox apartments, and I checked in with them often, also wanting to hear their personal accounts. I hated reading the news, yet I was obsessed with it, checking The New York Times first thing in the morning, on our lunch break, and the last thing before bed.

By the end of April, we were getting texts, phone calls, and Facebook notifications about people we’d lost to the virus: a neighbor we often chatted with, a friend we had known for years whom we hung out with in early days, parents of friends, people Niklas had worked with in Sweden. At that time we had about a dozen close friends and acquaintances sick with the virus in New York who were in various stages of recovery. With heavy hearts we watched what was happening in what we still considered our city, with the death tolls skyrocketing, with morgues overflowing and bodies being loaded into freezer trucks.

The worse things got, the harder we worked, filling our days with frenetic activity until our arms, legs, and even our fingers ached. We took out our tension by demolishing walls, busting through drywall with crowbars, sledgehammering through brick. Yet no matter how much grueling activity, how much we hauled off and hammered, how satisfying the results, it wasn’t enough to chip away at the anxiety bubbling up under the surface, which occasionally boiled over in the way we would snap at each other over nothing. And if Niklas snapped at me, oh, I could snap back—I had wells of emotion to tap into. I had misplaced anger ready to erupt—mainly at our country’s leadership and lack thereof—and mountains of sadness I was trying to suppress. We both did. At times it took a huge amount of effort, for both of us, I believe, to practice patience and kindness.

While I was concerned about my East Coast friends as the lockdown continued, we, too, were very much alone, and by mid-May I felt it. Niklas and I tried to remain positive, and often reminded each other that compared to others we were lucky. But we were affected. We had desired a quieter lifestyle, shifted our whole life to get it. Yet it is not normal to have no human contact except with your spouse for days and weeks on end. And even when the lockdown was lifted, people were cautious—and rightfully so—as the virus surged and spread and Tennessee became a hotbed of infection.

We had no shortage of projects to keep us busy, yet we were in a holding pattern as far as really settling in to our new life; at times it was like the whole world slowed to a complete stop on its axis, and we were the only two left in it. When we got along we were the happiest people on earth, soulmates, he and I against the world, but when we argued or I had a bad day, I felt isolated in a way that I never had in New York City. Here I had nowhere to go. We had one unreliable, rattling truck between the two of us which had already broken down on me thrice, and so at times I felt trapped—in a beautiful setting—but trapped all the same. Watching the news—too much news probably—lead to intense anxiety. I meditated daily, focusing on each breath, in and out, in and out, imagining waves.

The word retreat had become a command, an order that was lasting for months. We didn’t see people for many weeks at a time other than at the checkout of the supermarket or a hardware store, from our eyes behind a mask, searching their eyes behind a mask, when what we really needed was a smile. Instead we saw fear, my credit card handed back like it was a dirty thing, the cashier disinfecting after touching the items in my cart, then Niklas and I disinfecting her germs from the safety of our vehicle.

When we finally had my cousin’s family over to grill outside, I was giddy for the company. I told Niklas in bed that night that I realized what I had missed: laughter. It was euphoric and the high lasted for days afterwards.

Until, that is, I turned on the evening news to see buildings vandalized and burning in cities across the country. I empathized with the protestors and believed in their cause fully, but I also felt sickened and saddened for small businesses already ravaged by the pandemic. Yet as mostly peaceful protestors took to the streets throughout the country, in small towns, and across the world in solidarity, and continued week after week, their activism gave me a glimmer of hope.

This younger generation’s stamina was making an impact, inspiring me to look into local protests in downtown Nashville. It was the first time I was not involved in a movement that I felt was important. But I felt it was not physically safe, and I was mentally spent. I wondered if it was okay to let the younger generation take the torch. Yet I felt bad about not doing more.

Here the word retreat now struck a different tone to my ears, rang of guilt. Perhaps I had retreated too far, too deep in the woods, too far removed from what was happening in the world, from everything I used to know and who I used to be. Was I doing enough? In fact, I wasn’t really doing anything—other than sharing the occasional powerful or biting meme on Facebook—and wondered whether it was enough just to be a good citizen, a good person.

We had been searching for balance in moving across the country, and our mental health was and continues to be an important priority. I had a month straight of intense insomnia in June which turned me into a barely-functioning zombie in the daytime, doing the bare minimum, too exhausted to make time to meditate, yet ironically with enough mental energy for endless hours of worry and anxiety about not getting enough done—in my home and in the world. Fortunately, with advice from my therapist and light meds, eventually my sleep patterns returned to normal, yet it did contribute to the bigger question. I struggled with whether it is possible to maintain internal peace of mind while being informed of and involved in an external world full of chaos and sadness.

Living out here in the country, I often wonder if keeping my head in the trees and in the clouds—which I stare at often in this panoramic view—is the same as sticking my head in the sand. I believe in the healing power of nature; it grounds me to the moment and brings me pleasure, and I prefer pleasure over pain. Hearing the thunder of horse hooves pounding the earth as they run across the adjacent field awakens a feeling that’s hard to describe—an innate admiration for their strength and beauty that the reverberations on the soil stir deep in my soul. Exotic-looking swallowtail butterflies that I thought only existed in the tropics flutter around here, almost as big as birds. I watch the blue herons with their wide wingspan swoop down and follow the creek at the same time each evening, and somehow they provide rhythm and meaning to my own routines.

I see that suddenly overnight honeysuckle has grown and overtaken a bush, and each time I pass it I stop to put my nose to golden white flowers and inhale one of my favorite scents from childhood. As summer rages on, I see that growth is unstoppable, exploding, filling in every gap and then spilling over, vines and tendrils covering and cascading. So is it acceptable to just sit on the porch and take it all in? Is it okay to feel intense joy in troubling times? I’ve come to believe it’s not only acceptable, it’s necessary.

Recently I invited a neighbor over—the woman who owns the therapy horse farm next door—and it was wonderful to connect and have coffee on our deck. She also runs a charity—and since the pandemic her outreach has amped up; the barns are full of food and clothing for the community. As she left, I handed her a bag of clothes, batteries, and toiletries. She told me good fiction was always in high demand and I stuck a few books inside. Days later I attended a monthly meeting on Zoom for the Democratic Party in my small county, with whom I will be volunteering during the lead up to the big election in November. I voted in a local election for the first time in my new state, and then I went to a used bookstore and bought a whole load of inexpensive used fiction to donate, a wide variety of my favorites, books that moved me. While it’s not much, this is something, I thought to myself, that I can give.

These small steps feel good. And I remind myself that change is made up of many tiny decisions, a small push toward something and pull away from something else, an ebb and flow that directs us toward one trajectory. And it’s these hundreds of daily decisions that ultimately define us.

No, I will not allow myself to retreat from important issues, nor I will not stop caring or getting angry, but I will allow myself to wade in the creek with my dog when the mood strikes, to smell the honeysuckle each and every time I walk by that bush, to stop and follow the movement of a butterfly with my eyes. Because if we become numb and complacent—to any of it, to all of it, what is happening at the furthest stretches of the globe as well as our closest surroundings—that, I believe, is the biggest threat to humanity, and that’s when we should really worry.

Christie Grotheim’s debut novel, The Year Marjorie Moore Learned to Live, was published in 2019 by Heliotrope Books. Her stories have been featured in Salon, The New York Observer, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, West View News, TravelMag.net, and Petrolicious.com among others. Christie is co-curator of Crystal Radio Sessions, a monthly reading series in Manhattan’s legendary KGB Bar, and is in hopes of hosting a sister series in Nashville, where she has recently relocated with her husband Niklas and her beloved dachshund. When she’s not hard at work on her second novel—with pen in hand—she can be found with crowbar, nail gun, or power drill in hand, working with Niklas on renovating their fixer-upper, hammering away at their dream of opening an artists’ retreat in 2021.