I just finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, which tells the story of Gogol — a second generation Indian American. A major theme in the book is how Gogol’s identity is split between the country he was born and raised in (America) and his ancestral country of India. He is split between his parents’ teachings, culture, food, sense of home, dreams for him and his American ideals, goals and desires. So many of the interviews I have conducted bring up this same reality for immigrants, refugees, and asylees.

And an overwhelming feeling of loneliness pervades these interviews as well. The loneliness of leaving ones home— forever; of leaving what is known and entering a space of constant uncertainty; of leaving family, country and culture. The loss of community, and thus of identity. But this loneliness is not just in my interviews with the clients, it is also in my conversations with service providers. “We live in a very disconnected world,” one woman told me. Another man said that, in America “You live in big houses all by yourselves,” you don’t live in community, with extended family in the home. And if community is identity (as I am proposing that it is), then … who are we in isolation?

America has created a culture that thrives on a false sense of independence and autonomy, of survival of the fittest, and every man for himself, of capitalism and profit. “We have a strong bias against helping people here,” one service provider said to me. We don’t inherently understand our interconnectedness, interdependence -- community as an ecosystem for survival.

And perhaps this loneliness has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Whole identities stripped away. Jobs lost, loves ones suddenly gone, social circles and support systems disappeared overnight. In the same way that the Pandemic has amplified the cracks in our broken systems (many of which are intentionally difficult and humiliating for those seeking services), so too has it put pressure on the cracks in our sense of self and of belonging — or dis-belonging. Enough pressure to shatter?

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to commune with folks at RCHP over the past 6 months. I also feel a sense of loss at what might have been. Understanding that this residency had to happen now, but also recognizing how incredibly limited the work is because of the pandemic and the (still) soaring numbers of COVID cases in NJ. I mourn for all the stories that are not accessible during this time. That cannot be told. But as I write this play, I try to lean into what IS, rather than the negative space of what is silenced and left out.

“emptiness of will means wanting only what one is”

I lean into the hope of creation, rather than into the disappointment I am feeling.

The desire is what it desires.

I try to look to the approaching spring, the opening up, the blooming, the sprouts, rather than to the traces of winter that the pandemic has left in its wake, which still cling to us, fear and trauma, a cold deep in the bones.

To be what one was when one was not. Approaching non-being.

Like Gogol, I am split between two ideas, two experiences, two realties.

Two possibilities?

A piece of his story, always out of reach, somewhere else. A piece of himself always missing. And therein lies perhaps the greatest loneliness of all. To be distanced from oneself.

But through art, through church, through metal health care we may reunite the pieces of the self… through spaces for community to gather, through the telling and re-telling of your story, though the affirming of your story, though the interruption of false narrative and histories, through and through and through, we move through. And suddenly it is spring.

-Quotes from Meister Eckhart (German theologian and philosopher)