The Backstop

There’s a scene from the first season of Alone Australia that most people who watched it seem to remember. A woman is sitting by herself in the bush in western Tasmania, talking to the camera she has to carry and run herself. She is talking to her daughter, who died when she was three, and partway through she breaks down. Nobody comes. Nobody can. That’s the premise of the show. And she lets it all the way through, and then it ends, and she’s still there.

We had the whole season playing one day, start to finish. I’ve watched every season of the American version too, and something happens to the people who last a long time out there: they come back with insight, the kind that changes how they live. Nobody’s teaching them. It seems to be what long solitude does to a person once the distractions run out.

The woman’s name is Gina Chick, and the insight she came back with is the one I want to write about, because I think almost everyone carries some version of it. Most of us keep a corner of the heart back. We love people, sometimes enormously, but we hold one small part in reserve, just in case. It feels like wisdom. It can even look like peace. Gina found out it was a wall, and she found out by asking herself a question the show was designed to reward: why am I doing so well out here on my own?

That’s the claim of this piece. Being fine alone can be the armour. There’s a kind of letting go that frees you, and a kind of holding back that only looks like it. The old contemplative traditions had a name for the counterfeit, and Gina’s life holds both the real thing and the fake, side by side.

I.The strongest person on the island

Alone is simple. Ten people are dropped into the wilderness separately, with a small kit of tools, a camera and no crew. They hunt, forage, build shelter and film themselves. They can leave whenever they want. The last one still out there wins. In the first Australian season the ground was lutruwita, western Tasmania, and the prize was $250,000.

Gina was 52, a bushcraft teacher and rewilding facilitator who lived in an off-grid shack. On paper she was well suited to it. But the story she brought with her is what made the season.

Years earlier, she was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was pregnant. Her doctors told her the pregnancy hormones were feeding the cancer and that she would have to end the pregnancy or she would die. She didn’t accept the path she was being pushed down. She found doctors who would listen, delayed chemotherapy, read the studies on chemotherapy during pregnancy herself, and chose the drugs she was willing to take. She had three months of treatment. Her daughter, Blaise, was born at full term, healthy and heavy, far bigger than anyone had predicted.

Then Blaise got cancer, and died at three.

I’ve thought a lot about the word strong since watching her. We usually mean force by it, the strength to lift and push and fight, and by that measure we tend to call men strong and women, mostly, weaker. But there’s another kind of strength: the kind that carries. A woman carries another human being inside her for nine months, through a body that keeps changing under her, through discomfort and pain that doesn’t let up, and then through birth itself. I don’t think it’s an insult to anybody to say that a lot of people who are strong in the first sense would fold under that, and quickly. Gina did it through chemotherapy, against advice that told her to stop.

The Tao Te Ching made this argument two and a half thousand years ago, using water. “There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it.” Water doesn’t win by force. It wins by staying, and by keeping on.

So when I say Gina was the strongest person on that island, I don’t mean she could outlast the cold, though she did. I mean she had already carried more than most of us will ever be asked to. Which makes what she discovered out there harder to see, and more important. Because strength like that can build a wall without noticing it has.

II.“Why am I okay out here on my own?”

Gina lasted 67 days and won. When it was over she said she left the wilderness “more in love than I’ve ever been in my life,” mostly with the land itself.

But the thing that stopped me came later, in the reunion show, when the conversation turned to needing people. Here is what she said:

“I love so many people, I love with such a huge heart and am loved by so many people. … And yet there’s been this part that I’ve just held back. I will love you, I will love you, but I’m not going to need you, because if I need you, you might die. And I can’t do that again.”

She went on. She hadn’t realized, she said, that she’d “taken this little corner of my heart and held it for myself as a backstop.” She found it when she started asking herself why she was fine alone out there, and kept pulling at the question “like the magician’s scarves,” one after another, until the last thing came out of the hat. And then she laughed at herself a little, because once she saw it, it was obvious. She’d been holding herself away from needing people to protect herself from feeling that pain again.

If I need you, you might die. I don’t think anybody could say it more plainly.

Look at what the show was measuring. Alone rewards self-sufficiency above everything. The person who copes best without anyone wins the money. And Gina, coping beautifully without anyone, took that very fact as a question instead of a trophy. Why is this so easy for me? The answer was that she had trained for it. Not with bushcraft. With grief. Somewhere after Blaise died, part of her decided never to depend on anyone again, and solitude felt like home because she’d been keeping a piece of herself alone the whole time.

The Buddhist tradition has a precise word for what she found. In the fifth century, the commentator Buddhaghosa described the four “divine abodes” that Buddhist practice cultivates: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. He gave each one a far enemy, its obvious opposite, and a near enemy: a counterfeit that looks so much like the real thing that you can live inside it for years without noticing. The near enemy of loving-kindness, he said, is greed: wanting, dressed up as love. The near enemy of equanimity is a kind of dull, unknowing indifference that passes for calm.

That’s the backstop. From the outside, I’ll love you, but I won’t need you looks like the non-attachment the traditions praise. It sounds balanced and grown-up. But it isn’t equanimity. Equanimity stays open to everything, including loss. The backstop is a door kept shut so that loss can never reach the centre again. It’s the near enemy, and it’s very hard to see from inside, because it works. It keeps you safe. It also keeps you a little bit alone, always.

That may be why the people who last on Alone so often come back changed. Out there, the distractions that normally hide a wall like that run out. All that’s left is you and the question of why you are the way you are. The desert monks of early Christianity knew this. One of them, asked for a word of guidance, told the visitor to go and sit in his cell, and the cell would teach him everything. Gina’s cell was a shelter in the Tasmanian rain, and it taught her the one thing she’d been careful not to learn.

III.Two kinds of letting go

When Gina won, the person who walked up to tell her was Lee.

Lee is Blaise’s father, Gina’s former husband, and in her words, her best friend. In a piece she wrote for the ABC’s Australian Story, she told why they separated. Lee had always wanted to be a father to many children. Gina had five miscarriages in twelve months, and she came to accept that she couldn’t have more children. So they parted, as she puts it, so that he could. She said their wedding vows had been about supporting each other’s “soul journeys,” not about staying together until death.

Lee has a partner now, Hannah, and two daughters. Gina is their godmother. She says she helped nudge Lee toward Hannah in the first place.

I keep trying to imagine it. Two people go through the worst loss there is together, and then one of them lets the other go, so that he can have the family she can’t give him, and stays close enough to become godmother to his children. And when she wins, after 67 days alone, he’s the one who comes. In her account, she saw him in a bright blue parka, screamed, and her knees gave way, and he held her up. She told him he was real. He told her she’d done it.

How many people could do that, on either side?

This is the other kind of letting go, and it’s the real one. Letting Lee go wasn’t holding back. It was the opposite: love that wanted his whole life, even the parts that wouldn’t include her. That’s what the traditions mean by non-attachment. You don’t stop loving. You stop gripping. You love someone enough to let their life be theirs.

So Gina’s story has both. She did the true thing with Lee, and she built the false one around her own heart. From the outside they’re hard to tell apart. Both involve letting go. Both can look calm. One opens your hands. The other closes a door.

There’s a Tame Impala song that’s been in my head all week, “‘Cause I’m a Man,” from Currents. Kevin Parker said it’s “about how weak men are, basically.” Its narrator admits he’ll never be as strong as the woman he’s singing to, and pleads that he’s only human, moved by something bigger than himself. It’s half confession and half excuse, and Parker wrote it as both on purpose. I’m only human can be real humility, or it can be a way to get off the hook. That’s the near enemy again, in a pop song: the virtue and its counterfeit, in the same words.

Lee, in Gina’s telling, is the answer to that song. He didn’t use being a man as an excuse for anything. He let go when letting go was the loving thing, stayed through the grief, and was there to hold her up when she fell.

IV.The grief storm

The scene I started with, Gina breaking down while talking to Blaise, wasn’t staged for anyone. It was a grief storm that happened to be filmed, because out there the camera is always running and there’s no one else to hold it. It was afterwards, when strangers began reaching out to thank her, that she saw what it had shown. In the reunion she put it in her own words: “what a grief storm looks like,” that “there is a beginning and an end,” and that “on the other side is gratitude.” She said she hoped it might open the door for people to feel their own grief.

She means it literally. She has said she has no regrets, that she treasures the three years she had with Blaise, and that grief is the other side of love. In another interview she compared feelings like this to summer storms, which pass through if we let them.

If we let them. That phrase is the whole teaching. I wrote a piece on this site about Tame Impala called Let It Happen, and its spine was that you can’t force a change in yourself; you can only make room for it and then get out of the way. Kevin Parker said the song “Let It Happen” is about the chaos that comes at you, and that “it takes more energy to block it out than allow it to wash through you.” Gina’s grief storm is the same thing in its hardest form. Blocking it would have meant carrying it forever. Letting it come all the way through meant it could end, and what was left was gratitude.

I notice something here, though. The storm she let through was the grief. What she didn’t let through, for years, was the need. She could feel the loss of Blaise completely and still keep that one corner back, so that no one else’s loss could ever reach it. That’s how the near enemy hides. It hides right next to a strength. She was brave about grief, and the bravery made it easier to miss the wall.

V.Showing what it looks like

In the reunion Gina said that since the show aired, people have hugged her in the street. Strangers have told her about their own losses. “So many grieved parents” came up to her to say thank you, thank you for showing what that looks like.

She put it beside another contestant from her season, Chris, an Army veteran of Iraq who lives with PTSD, whose hardest moments were caught on camera too. She said it was beautiful to watch him show what a PTSD storm looks like, and to learn from it that a person can feel the whole thing and come all the way through.

I think this is the most hopeful thing in the story, and it’s very simple. Most of us have never seen anyone grieve fully. We see the funeral and then the brave face. So when our own storm comes, we think something is wrong with us, and we build a wall. Then one person’s storm happens where others can see it, beginning, middle and end, and a stranger in a supermarket somewhere realizes that what they’re feeling is survivable, and that they’re allowed to feel it.

This site takes its name from Terence McKenna’s idea that a sick society produces antibodies: strategies, and people, that start to heal it from the inside. I usually think of that as something grand. Watching Gina, I think it’s mostly this. One person feels something all the way through, where others can see, and it gives everyone watching permission to do the same. That’s how the healing happens, one person at a time.

VI.The teaching

Here is what I take from her, put as simply as I can.

Needing people isn’t the weakness. The backstop is.

The traditions are clear that clinging causes suffering, and they’re right. But it’s easy to hear that and conclude that the safest thing is never to need anyone, and that’s the near enemy: holding back dressed up as letting go. Real non-attachment is harder, and braver. It’s loving and needing with open hands, knowing the people you need can die, and needing them anyway. Kahlil Gibran put it better than anyone, in The Prophet: “For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.” Love that’s real doesn’t come with a backstop. It comes with the risk.

Gina knew that already, in one direction. She let Lee go without holding on. She let the grief storm come without blocking it. What she learned out there, alone, in the very place built to reward the opposite, was to take down the last wall: to let herself need people again, knowing exactly what that can cost.

What she’s done with it since is hers. I know what it did to me. Listening to her say it in the reunion broke me open. I sat there crying harder than I have in a long time, because I recognized the corner. I think most of us would, if we were honest.

You don’t need 67 days in the Tasmanian rain to find it. You can ask her question anywhere. Where am I fine on my own, and why? Pull on whatever comes out of that, one scarf at a time, and see what’s at the bottom of the hat.

When she came out of the bush, the first person to reach her was the man she’d loved enough to let go. He held her up. And she left, she said, more in love than she had ever been in her life.

This reading is part of The Signal, the site’s section on the meaning behind a work, and it sits beside Let It Happen, on Tame Impala and making room for change. The teachings it stands on are on the Map: The Four Brahmaviharas, Water and Stone, On Love — The Pruning, and, on the death of a child, Letter to Rachel and Bearing the Unbearable. For anyone grieving, the collection What to Read When Someone Has Died gathers what the traditions said. The site’s name comes from The Antibody. Gina Chick has told her own story in her memoir, We Are the Stars.