The Winter Pond
In the early morning, when I look in the mirror, pinching rich melanin skin and examining the smooth curves of freckled flesh, I don’t recognize her. Her eyes are not bright blue like the tropical sea and her hair does not cascade down like blonde sun beams through roof rafters. She appears as a foreigner in her own family and her history is an alien to her memories. I lean closer towards the mirror until her nose meets mine. In the reflection while my eyes scrutinizingly scan her face, I am overwhelmingly aware of every gold, black, brown, and chestnut fleck in her eyes. When she moves, I move. When she speaks, I speak. When she cries, I cry. There are many ways I could rid myself of her motives, thoughts, and feelings. For years, I have survived by conforming to the American society. Before they jeer at me for the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes, I make the quip first. I use puppet strings to control her, making her dance around the room as a convincingly typical American girl. I took away her freedom of speech, forcing her mother tongue down into the depths of forgotten memories. This was to ensure that her trauma is not spoken about — I do not have time to sit and listen to her as I do not have time to sit by a pond to ponder its depth. My adoptee identity had already slipped through my fingers and fallen into its watery abyss and I had no plans of diving down for it. But today, I hold my breath and descend, inexperienced limbs kicking and propelling my way to the pond’s floor. I continue to stare into the mirror, aware that I am almost to the bottom of the pond. The water cups my ears, blocking out worldly noises like cars rushing, dogs barking, birds chirping, TV talking, and phones ringing. In the early morning, I am alone with her. But as I reach the bottom of the pond, I realize that I am alone with myself.
I am uncomfortable with such solitude. The society around me has trained me to depend on a type of social suffocation resulting in philosophical death. I frantically kick up to the surface, desperate to go back to the comforts of worldly chatter. We are a species reliant upon noise as a sedative for sleep, and without it, our minds cannot dream blissfully. But living in bliss is not living in peace. I ponder the American philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1849) as he depicted such peace alone off-grid by Walden Pond. He encouraged complete solitude and a simplistic lifestyle. However, a humble woodchopper began visiting Thoreau in the woods, showcasing the sweet absence of political and societal complications he experiences. Thoreau is instantly enamored by the woodchopper’s meek existence and began holding his ideologies in the highest esteem. But as the two men conversed deeper, Thoreau’s figurative alter around the woodchopper began to crumble. When asked if he wanted the world to change, the woodchopper answered, “No, I like it well enough.” Conflicting perceptions of the man plagued Thoreau as he did not know whether this man was “as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child.” True, the man lived in perfect bliss, but at the expense of political education. It showed the need for a balance of societal solitude and political education. Thoreau explains that we can separate ourselves from society, while still remaining sensitive to the world around us. We are in the world, but we do not need to be of the world. We cannot grow numb to the pain and suffering of others and ignorantly wish the world to remain as it is like the woodchopper. Of course, we enjoy a world that benefits our needs, wants, and desires. But we need to open our eyes to understand that sometimes these gifts of privilege hurt others simultaneously. Solitude, therefore, is not alienation from culture, but the deliberate decision to reflect inward.
I often speak of culture as though it is a transcendent tonic to cure the fog of my identity. Recall that when I reflected inward by peering into the mirror of my soul, I refused to accept my Asian features or adoptee history. Many adoptees have unresolved trauma buried by years of societal conformity to survive in a world where racism and adoption stigma runs deep. I believe Yaa Gyasi put it best in her novel Transcendent Kingdom (2020). She writes in the perspective of Gifty, the child of immigrant parents whose mother suffered from severe depression,
“If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound” (p. 121).
When the wound of abandonment threatens to break again, our only hope for survival is to cover it with a callus. Thoreau explains something similar when he speaks of Walden Pond as though it were his own soul, inspired by both its physical and philosophical depth. During the winter season, Walden Pond freezes over with a thick layer of ice. The cold desolate climate of trauma and depression threatens to freeze my pond so that I am unable to practice deep self-reflection and discovery. As the ice begins to thicken, parts of my identity are unable to resurface to breathe. Similarly, when Gifty recognized her mother’s emotional callous, she was simultaneously recognizing her own. Abandonment is quite a large wound that is lethal to human identity if neglected. Gifty acknowledges the many “shades of loss” that she and her family have gone through during their time in America. Throughout the novel, Gifty seems to separate her identity into pieces, shoving some down at the bottom of her pond. She even admits to such inner alienation when she explains,
“Here is a separation. Your heart, the part of you that feels. Your mind, the part of you that thinks. Your soul, the part of you that is” (p. 128).
As a neuroscience PhD student, Gifty broods that the soul is never mentioned in science. She frantically searches for oceans of understanding within science instead of acknowledging the self-reflective pond right outside her front door. Similarly, I have repressed my trauma, pursuing fulfillment in other worldly philosophies like cultural conformity and socialization.
Throughout his novel, Thoreau continues to showcase the importance of solitude and sound. He paints sound in a negative light and admires solitude for its ability to focus on nurturing the soul instead of imprisoning it with societal trends and chains. During his time philosophically experimenting with solitude in the woods near Walden pond, he expresses his reasoning,
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (p. 155).
In other words, he has decided to live a year naked and vulnerable with himself, understanding every aspect of his soul. Too much of society influences our dreams, desires, and identities. In fact, he stresses that conformity murders individuality. Such liberation is not just gaining acknowledgement from society, but also the individual soul’s readiness to accept its own uniqueness. Thoreau also mentions the depth of his pond as a metaphor for looking deep into his soul. As he ponders an old belief that Walden was thought of as a “bottomless” pond, Thoreau analytically picks apart the physical depth of its waters. He concludes that it is one-hundred and seven feet deep, which is considered quite vast for such a small pond. Relating these findings to his own philosophical desires, he marvels,
“This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol” (p. 484).
This continued metaphor makes an absurdity of the notion that humans must continue filling their minds with societal viewpoints instead of exploring the vast depth of their own soul. Investigating my own life, the noisy and hectic lifestyle offered to me by society drowns my own inner voice. As my identity grows, it becomes forgotten and foreign, almost like an entirely different being. Thoreau encourages us to reunite with our identities through self-reflection until we accept all aspects of ourselves.
When we experience childhood trauma, our sense of identity has not fully developed.
“Get ahold of yourself,”
Gifty sternly scolded herself as she looked at her own reflection in the mirror,
“but doing so felt cliché, like I was reenacting a scene from a movie, and so I started to feel like I didn’t have a self to get ahold of, or rather that I had a million selves, too many to gather. One was in the bathroom, playing a role; another, in the lab staring at my wounded mouse, an animal about whom I felt nothing at all, yet whose pain had reduced me somehow. Or multiplied me. Another self was still thinking about my mother.”
The many aspects of her identity and trauma are mentally separated and placed into boxes. Therefore, we frantically search for outward validation and enlightenment to make sense of the situation. This not only separates us from inner self-reflection, but also splits our identities, showcasing the positive features while simultaneously hiding the negative ones. Gifty feels this broken sense of identity throughout the novel and continues to search for external answers like science to validate her trauma. From her suicidal mother, absent father, and deceased brother, she rejects the emotions that stem from these experiences. She further explains the emotions that are byproducts of such self-fragmentation as she explains that
“Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house” (p. 58).
But as she begins to look deeper into her mirror, acknowledging years of trauma, culture, and broken relationships, she pieces her identity back together. Her mornings no longer consist of going to the cold lab which metaphorically freezes her pond. Instead, she looks in the mirror, peacefully accepting her trauma: her father’s absence, her brother’s passing, and her mother’s suicidal depression.
In the early morning, I went to the pond because I wished to dive deliberately. When I reached the bottom, I realized the complexities of identity and the depth of life. My reflection showed the dark brown hair and almond-shaped eyes of my ancestors. The echos of my cultural heritage fill the water along with trauma, memories, and a spiritual uniqueness fervently waiting to be seen again. Separating this identity initiates a slow frost over my pond. The shades of loss I endured were not given to me for decoration, but to use as a means of emotional, cultural, and spiritual transcendence. Solitude promotes such inner unity and self-reflection, muffling all worldly chatter, though it is not a complete alienation from culture and politics. Therefore, I believe loneliness to be the result of a fractured identity. Before the moments of self-reflection, I was deeply alone though I gained immense praise from society for concealing my thoughts, conforming to the current of American culture. I had many friends, but my pond was starving and untouched. The thoughts of Thoreau and Gyasi implore me as a transracial adoptee to accept the aspects of myself I have tossed away. To dive deliberately is the way to live deliberately. I sit with myself at the bottom of the pond and am comfortable in its solitude.
I am alone, but I am not imprisoned by loneliness, for I have the freeing company of my unique identity.
