#2 An ode to loneliness

You can feel lonely anytime. Even when it’s uncanny. Like when you have a family and a boyfriend and friends who love you.

You can feel lonely anytime. Even when it’s uncanny. Like when you have a family and a boyfriend and friends who love you.

I feel lonely often. Misunderstood, even. This isn’t a cry for help or some thinly veiled public shaming of the people who (ought to) love me (better). As my housemate and very dear friend says, this is absolutely a me problem.

But can you blame me?

We’re social creatures; we invented and are now collectively enamoured by social media because validation and being in the throng tastes so good. It’s the sixth taste after umami.

So why just get that richness from your four actual friends when you can get it from strangers, too?

In my unscientific mind, it’s because we want to be loved and understood and held to the breast of the masses.
It’s only cool to stand apart from the crowd when everyone’s looking at you.

There’s this pervasive sense that loneliness is just for old men who live in cream brick units and eat spam.
To be consumed by loneliness is shadowy and peripheral and most certainly not for the young among us, the working, the coolly clothed, the great curators of playlists.
These people don’t get lonely because to be lonely you need to be alone on Saturday nights and have only one and half people that know you exist.

But I don’t think that’s true or correct at all.  
I’ve been lonely lying in bed next to my partner. I’ve been lonely responding to a sweet text from a friend. I’ve even been lonely at a picnic.  

If you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, I’ll try and describe it to you. It feels like when you were a kid and you went on school camp and missed your mum. Even at dinner in the mess hall hum.
It’s like a pang and a dislodging of something important that shouldn’t come away. A tooth filling.
For me, unchecked the feeling blossoms like ink on silk. I’m a raging fourteen-year-old and no one really gets me.

I think this feeling belongs to the sense of being an individual in the world. Or to put it crudely, being alone in the head.
Even and perhaps especially when you’re in love or very happy, the truth is, you’re an individual. An individual with a mind, thoughts and feelings that are not entirely knowable to anyone outside the body that holds them.

“You come into the world alone and you leave alone.” That’s true. Of course not technically, you were born in the same nanosecond as millions of other mewling babes, and you’ll die in an unfathomable horde. Around the world at any one time, people are leaving and entering the realm of the living in ceaseless swarms. But really, the birthing and the dying, it happens inside you.

You can’t do it with anyone else.

You’re a singular bottle of thoughts and fears and secrets you’ll never fully share, stuff you can’t even articulate properly because it’s so hazy and indefinable or hidden up the back.  

For me at least, I think that’s where the pang of loneliness can come from.

I wish I could invite someone into my mind, have them watch my memories, see things through my specific flavour of gaze. Coloured by all the things I’ve seen and done and read about. Have them sit on the pink cushion of my brain and say, “I can see how you think that” and “holy shit, you’re right - she really does seem to dislike you”. Perhaps that would quell the aloneness I feel even when I’m rushing up Swanston street, on my way to meet a friend for pho.

But instead, it just is. A sweet ukulele twang that cuts through at weird moments. You’re alone. No one truly knows you. How can they? You’re so multitudinous and vast it’s beyond comprehension.
A galaxy is suspended within you.

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The fact that I sometimes feel lonely is an ode to my inclination toward introspection. I spend a lot of time swimming in the reality that no one really knows who I am except me. I guess that’s what they call navel gazing, or maybe it’s narcism.

But I think, now that I’m writing about it and putting shape to something that is nebulous and unwieldy, it’s probably very important to get OK with the alone-ness. 
You may as well lean way into the fact that the pink cushion of your brain is known only to you. 
For me, parsing over the discomfort of being alone in the head is becoming a useful thing. It’s what’s slowly pushing me towards the shit I like. It’s what keeps me hungry and searching for beautiful stuff, creative outlets, meaningful relationships. Even when pursuing those things feels uncomfortable.

So there it is, the duality of my individuality: loneliness giving way to learning about who I am. The sadness becomes sweet again.