Human Touch Deprivation

October 18, 2023

This journal is becoming something of a good friend to me. It’s a multi-layered beneficial thing. This has always been my experience with journaling.

One of the interesting things about journaling, as opposed to writing a sermon, topical article, term-paper, or thesis is that journaling simply follows the ebb and flow of things. I don’t have to stay on topic and work to a conclusion, though there is value in such. This journaling, however, allows me a lot of liberty to chase and collect some of the thoughts that occupy my mind-space these days at this stage of this crazy life-transition that I have been plunged into.

In journaling, I can embrace and entertain my emotions. I’m writing more out of my soul these days than I am out of my head.

I was thinking about some of those truck drivers on the Interstate this morning on my way to take care of some things. I couldn’t help but to wonder how many of them … well-passed the common retirement age … are still behind the wheel because the road is all they know and the road is all they have. How many of them have no one waiting for them at home after the run? So, they drive … they turn up the tunes and drive. Making the miles and making the money with no one at home to call their “honey”. The miles, the log book, the speedometer and tach, and the occasional Lot Lizard become their life. 

Yeah. I get it. I’ve never really thought about it before this morning. But I get it. At least I think I get it. I, at least, get some of it. I am, in some ways, doing the very same thing they are every time I pull out on a ramble. I'm not looking for Lot Lizards though and encounter them everywhere I go. And it doesn’t have to be a long ramble either. A two-hour drive in the country on a beautiful day is generally well worth the cost of the gasoline. Especially when you have someone beside you smashing the passenger seat enjoying the ride with you. Those drives turn into picnics in the small-town parks in the quaint little towns where you’ve never been before. Memory makers.

It's only recently that I have begun to see just how emotionally unwell I became after Shirli died. It was plenty obvious for me to see how physically debilitated and physically unwell I became. Mirrors don’t lie. They may not tell the whole truth. But they don’t lie about what you see of yourself. When you are in that deep and dark hole, you can’t accurately see where you are. I didn’t start seeing where I was really at until I started snatching and grabbing and climbing and finally some ray of hope started shining through. Recovering to where I am now has been anything but easy. The recovery is not over though and, in some ways, will never be over. Not as long as I have my memory.

I don’t know if there is such a malady by name as HTD. That’s what I call it. I’ve got it. I’ve got Human Touch Deprivation full-blown at this stage. Ah. Google “touch starvation”. I hate it. I hate it with a passion. And here I am damned nearly seventy years old just now beginning to realize the importance of human touch. And wasn’t that a hell of a road to get here. Hah. It busted me up. Yeah. It busted me up real bad.