Loneliness
“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.” -Charlotte Brontë
Loneliness is when the mere fact of being alone begins to take on a texture or flavor, ceasing to be a neutral condition. In other words, I am alone and I have an opinion about it. Often that initial taste is not pleasant, the texture is rough. I am alone and I don’t actually want to be alone — this dissonance is the experience of loneliness. The ordinary moment when the simple act of driving around town alone turns cold and we wish someone was in the passenger seat next to us. Or we endure and enjoy yet another long day of parenting children, finally getting them settled in bed, and the strong shift to silence is a bit more than we can bear. Loneliness is disruptive and swift at times; it gets to all of us some day, and to some of us every day. Loneliness just might be one of the most common human experiences we share.
I want to offer two ways we can approach our loneliness that can soften it and perhaps sweeten its bitter bite. They have worked for me, and I hope they work for you. When approached with sincerity I think the looming gloom of loneliness blooms into something else entirely.
The first is how we talk about loneliness to ourselves. To say that I am lonely, or to say that I feel lonely, are both grammatically correct (I checked). And yet I think our word choice here is quite important in how we experience our own loneliness. In the past when I have declared “I am lonely!” it has had an edge of definiteness to it, as if it is going to take awhile to get out of the situation. And sometimes it does take awhile to get out of the situation. But that declaration also carries a sense of “this is something happening to me,” instead of something happening within me. On my bad days, I’ve turned that into a form of self-pity and shirked responsibility for my loneliness. “Its the world’s fault”, and therefore there isn’t much I can do about it but to sit in the unfair chair of despair.
Yet, if I shift my talk and admit instead that “I feel lonely” the experience starts to shift as well. Now it has a quality more akin to hunger or tiredness. If you haven’t eaten something for awhile, you get hungry. If you haven’t slept in awhile, you get sleepy. If you haven’t spent time with someone else recently or are spending the wrong kind of time with yourself, you will inevitably feel lonely. When I view loneliness more as operating on an empty emotional stomach than being marooned I feel more empowered to do something about it. This empowering moment, for me, always brings with it a sense of choice. I can choose to reach out to someone and set up a time for coffee or a meal, or even a simple phone call (some days, those calls are like a glass of cold water on a hot day). Or, I can also choose not to. Either way, I feel a little less stuck, less trapped, less oppressed by my loneliness. Ideally someone answers my call, we catch up or do something together, and I’m nourished like a good meal. But on the days the calls go to voicemail, the texts don’t get a reply, or I don’t even know who to reach out to in the first place there is another path.
The second way I soften loneliness is I turn inward and change how I am spending time with myself. Loneliness for me has become like a lighthouse, warning me that I am getting too close to the rocks (to the edge of myself) and need to head back out to deeper waters (to the center of myself). Put another way, when I feel lonely it is because I am living as only a part of me; not all of me. When I look back on the days I felt like I was fully me — not the me I think I am, but the true me I’ve always been — I don’t recall any moments of loneliness on a day like that. On the other hand, when I consider the long periods of loneliness in my life I will confess that at the time I felt more like a ghost of myself than anything else. This realization makes loneliness less problematic and more emblematic of how I am living my life at this moment.
So today, I hope that you don’t feel lonely. I hope that you see friends and family and a bright world, and feel like you belong and are loved. But if today is not like that. If today is hard and bleak and lonely. I hope that you believe you can do something about it. Today you can reach out to someone, chances are they might feel a little lonely themselves. Today you can reach out to yourself, and make sure that the You you are is the Youest you of them all. Live from there; because chances are no one else will.