On Loneliness

“Loneliness. An airport at 3 a.m. Somewhere, the sound of vacuuming. A beat-up old suitcase, unclaimed, goes around all night on the carousel. My life is like that bag. No, even worse… my life is like a squeezed-out tube of Anusol in that bag. Actually, I flatter myself — my life is not like the entire tube of Anusol but just the part that goes in the rectum.”

— Journal entry of April 5, 2021

I guess things are really healthy when you get to a point when you’re okay on your own. Now loneliness, that is a different feeling. A bit destructive, isolating feeling it is, isn’t it? Makes us blame the people in our lives, and the situation we’re in.

I guess in trying to get away from that feeling of loneliness, we miss the opportunity to understand it, to get comfortable with it. When I say, “I feel lonely” what does it even mean? Is it a thought? Is it an emotion? Is it an idea? Is it the idea of loneliness maybe that I feel?

When we look under that idea we often find an emotion, or combination of emotions at play. In explaining these emotions to ourselves, and making sense of them, we construct some storylines. It can be really powerful to look at those storylines and see what’s underneath them. What I’ve found is often in understanding them, we often let go of those storylines.

There have been moments in my life when I wished so desperately that things felt different, but I soon realized that you can’t set the timeline of when we feel things, we just need to deal with them and feel them as they come.

I think sometimes we’re in just different phases of life, and we just need to embrace whatever we’re going through as a part of that phase.

There definitely have been times in my life when even after having friends and family, I felt lonely sometimes. I think when I realized while in high school that I was doing all these gigs on the side, and knowing in the back of my mind that I might not be going straight down the uni path, there was almost a sense of disconnection between myself and the people around me. In that sense, there was a sense of “Ok, Sugar Pie, I guess we’re kind of on our own.” not in the sense of aloneness, but more of a feeling of isolation. I guess only when we feel isolated, do we feel lonely.

Funny enough, riding that deserted path (on a unicorn) with a cowboy hat and a banjo in my hand, having fewer people around, mostly me in front of my laptop, skyping and working with these “interesting” people halfway around the globe, in the quietness of my room I felt less lonely. It was like I felt more understood and accepted than I ever have been in my life.

I think we can only be lonely as individuals if we think about ourselves as being separate from others, as soon as that thought is gone, and as soon as you understand that there are lots of people, just like you, going through the same shit, loneliness just can’t exist.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
— Carl Jung

Sometimes the feeling of loneliness is strangely due to not having enough time on my own, overwhelmed by the number of things I’ve to do. Not having time for things that I recreationally enjoy doing creates a feeling of loneliness, missing the feeling of being on my own, and doing the things I love.

Sometimes instead of running away from this feeling, we just need to feel and embrace it. Realizing that it is okay to feel lonely. If you’ve gone through a breakup or if someone you loved dies, it is okay that you feel sad and lonely. If we don’t feel understood, it’s okay to feel lonely.

It isn’t our fault: a degree of distance and mutual incomprehension isn’t a sign that life has gone wrong. It’s what we should expect from the very start.  

The only way to come to terms with loneliness, solitude, and isolation is to deal with these most unwelcome realities. Give up any resistance to these feelings or the state that you fear the most: Hugging the pillows tightly, sighing louder and louder in the pillows, letting the tears flow, listening to Mr. Lonely or Rocket Man or whatever's your "Im-So-Fuckin-Lonely" song in the background.

Once we do that we take away the thing that we feared most. The only antidote to fear is to go through it. Only by embracing loneliness may its tyranny be broken.

Once we accept loneliness, we can get creative: we can start to send out messages in a bottle, flushing them in the toilet, hoping someone finds them: we can write poetry full of sexual innuendos, produce 5 volume book on bread and write blogs (that no one will read) (like this one), post a video of you practising that dance from Slumdog Millionaire because it makes you really happy; activities stemming from the realization that people around us won’t ever fully get us but that others — separated across time and space — might just.

Fin.