Cooties – how I caught them and how I got rid of them
Working in a chilly corporate environment, with clear distinctions between the people that mattered and those that didn’t, I came down with that dreaded childhood disease: the cooties.
My marriage to a man whom I once dearly loved, and thought would be my life partner ended when I was 50. The social scene in the 1980’s, when I was in my 30’s, was fun and interesting. Becoming single in my 50’s was a cold shower.
The young women at work had their own cliques and the people that mattered had theirs too. My beautiful apartment, in a large architectural gem of a building, was as friendly as a Red Roof Inn®. Many people were my age but making friends was akin to drilling a dry well. A depressed, divorced druggie was dead for a week before anyone figured out that the odor was his decomposing body. Was it an overdose or a suicide? The difference could be a fine line.
During my cootie episode, no one that I interacted with daily gave a hoot about me–I experienced solitary confinement while going to work every day. I didn’t realize how fragile I had become until my sister visited. We talk every day and she knew to drop everything to come in on a rescue mission.
Our conversation popped the lid off the feelings of isolation and ickiness and revealed an indisputable diagnosis: the cooties, confirmed by despairing shuddering sobs.
Two fundamental changes cured me. I took a job among people that I genuinely liked and who liked me. The humor was reliable, sharp and politically incorrect–a bad environment for sensitive, easily offended people but a great one if you take your humor with salt.
I overcame the magnetic field that surrounds my couch on Sunday mornings to become an active member of the Lake Street Church of Evanston, a community of intelligent, conscious, committed people. It still feels like a warm embrace in a world that seems to have lost its mind.
Today, many people are barely making ends meet and we are in the midst of a 40 + year housing crisis that is getting worse. In this environment–anger, vile racism, intolerance of people we perceive as “others,” and a political environment in which expressing one’s hateful views is okay–the cracks are obvious and dangerous.
The cure is equally obvious: social environments, including housing, that meet our fundamental need to be cared for, to care about others, and to rub shoulders with them every day.
In this astonishing political and economic climate, I treasure my close relationships more than ever and I need some of those relationships within daily hugging, i.e. house slipper, distance.
Regrettably, I don’t have that life-supporting luxury and many others don’t have it either and so I’m pioneering home sharing with people who like each other. Housing Mixers and many other posts explain more of this initiative.
Giving and receiving a reliable dose of care to people who enjoy each other is the environment in which people, including you and me, will thrive and keep those cooties at bay.
