Seasons of loneliness
The other day, my roommate asked me whether I'd want to spend a day doing something I like alone, or doing something I dislike but with someone I love.
At first, the answer was obvious. As a tried and true introvert, I spend a lot of time alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, and rather enjoy it. Most of the time, I am not lonely. I am simply alone.
But, I thought a moment. I remembered a cold and gray October day, when a mean-spirited rain fell in sheets and I was outside planting cloves of garlic three inches into the mud for five hours, hands numb but shoulder to shoulder with a friend from Italy who liked to talk about philosophy and free will and never failed to have fun.
If I had to choose, I would repeat that day in a heartbeat. Over any day I've spent alone. At the time, it was frustrating, verging on maniacally funny, but now is one of the best memories I have.
Moving to a new city has been interesting because it provides the delightful and daunting opportunity to cultivate community from scratch. Delightful because I can meet people as who I am now, instead of living in stories of who I once was. Daunting because I don't know anyone here. I'm forced to evaluate what sort of people I want to surround myself with and, therefore, what sort of person I am and want to be.
These past months, I've spent most of my time alone. Many Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons reading and walking and talking to myself. Somewhat to my surprise, I've had this sense of loneliness gently orbiting my world. Not a crushing weight of aloneness, but rather this valence. This thin, patient, almost delicate, feeling of being lonely.
This isn’t the cool and confident essay I had planned to publish. It doesn’t fit the attractive image of myself I’d like to project. But it’s what feels the most real right now.
Loneliness is a pain that comes at the threshold crossings of life. Crossings between places, crossings between jobs, crossings between beliefs. There's an ache of outgrowing old things. I find myself asking the same questions. Where do I fit in? What sort of people do I feel at home with? Who do I really care about? Who really cares about me? I'm less interested in connection that is forced or polite or full of pretence. I don't want kindness. I want love.
Because when I look into my own loneliness, it's not the breadth of connection that I miss, but the depth. The seeing and being seen. Friendship, true friendship, is a recognition of the self in the other. It's that moment of "Oh! You too? I thought I was the only one." True friendship is effortless. True friendship is as free as breathing.
I've realized the pain is not from being disliked by people, but rather my own inability to deal with their indifference. Put simply, no one is out to get me. They just don't care that much.
There is loneliness in people, but what is perhaps more piercing is loneliness in things. As in, I thought I had something but realized I don't have it anymore. Or maybe never did. My armor of identity, the things I could point to that made me feel good about myself, made me feel better than other people, I don't have anymore. I can no longer retreat to my intellect. I can no longer comfort myself because I read Dante and write essays. It all seems so full of holes now. Like a hand came in and poked its fingers through and now light is streaming in. In this sense, loneliness is a stripping away. A stripping away and a staring down of what's left. It's an experience of nakedness underneath all that armour. When I feel like I have nothing, what do I have?
Really, loneliness is being afraid of the space. Waiting, full of expectancy, for something to come in and fill it.
I think it's natural to have long bouts of melancholy in life. There is a poetry in accepting the seasons of the heart, much like the seasons of the year. To hold space to feel these things. To still keep a posture of serenity. There's this line I repeat in my head: "Open, open so much it hurts, and then open some more". I don't really know what it means. But I like it.
Last night I read that loneliness is just another form of vanity. It hurt, in the way that the truth usually does. After all, loneliness is only more self-immersion. The disease cannot be the cure.
April is a month of rain. When the wind blows and the skies open and a flood of water comes down upon the earth. When all that is old and dead and unprepared gets washed away. When only things founded on rock are left standing.
April is also a month of planting seeds. Seeds that get watered in the rain. Seeds that grow quietly in the soil. Seeds that may take months, or longer, to sprout.
All farmers know this.
In enduring admiration,
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"I've realized the pain is not from being disliked by people, but rather my own inability to deal with their indifference. Put simply, no one is out to get me. They just don't care that much." - I like it so much, becuase it is so accurate. That is the vicious circle of introverts, they do not care and stay away from people, so people stay away from them. So question arises: how can introvert find his other half, his or her partner? In the end, I think I know what you feel, because I am an introvert myself. Stay strong.
Great post Tommy. While part of me always believes that the way we feel about the world reflects not the objective state of the world but our subjective state within (so, in the context of loneliness, it would mean we feel lonely not because we are alone but because we lack a relationship with ourselves), I also know it's not always so simple. Still, from what I've gathered, you are a very well-integrated person, someone who knows himself and has a pretty strong self-relationship--someone who i would say is less prone to "loneliness." And so, what you're describing doesn't sound so much like loneliness as it does like some sort of tribelessness, or lack of belonging. Part of this must be the fact that you're in a new city, but the other part may be because God put you in this situation to learn something about yourself. Either way, you're right where you need to be!