On Being Alone
It’s Friday evening and it’s raining outside. It’s been raining all day and I worked from home. I ran to the grocery store at lunchtime, sudden gusts of wind testing my skin’s ability to provide tactile feedback for my grasp reflex around the umbrella handle.
Aside: I tend to not hold things properly, I grip too lightly and have a tendency to accidentally drop things for no apparent reason. It’s possible that it’s an early warning sign of some sort of degenerative cognitive function disease, except that I feel like it’s more of a distraction thing. Sometimes I forget I’m holding something. Which, in itself, could also be an early warning sign of some sort of degenerative cognitive function disease, but let’s pretend we didn’t notice that.
I’m listening to three hours of woodland ambience, wrapped in my noise cancelling headphones, because the dull monotony of urban sounds puts me on edge. What is it about the Cylon-hum of that one specific Toyota hybrid SUV that’s so unnerving? And why is that particular model so popular?
I’m aware as I’m writing this, that the tone of it is already beginning to sound like dialog that Grandpa Simpson would say. I heard “Why is that model so popular?” in Dan Castellaneta’s distinctive voice and laughed to myself.
The thing is, most people who say they are alone actually aren’t. I don’t mean people who are lonely, because yes, it’s very possible and sadly all too common to be lonely even in a sea of people, if you’re keeping the beat with bad company, as Mark put it. But I mean people who say they’re alone - as in “having no one else present” - when they have three cats, two dogs, a kid, a partner, and genuinely love and care for at least two or three of those, and receive love back from all of them.
Truly being alone is rare. The kind of alone where the last time you were physically touched by another human, aside from handshakes and fist bumps, was when a colleague put their arm around you at an after-hours work event, and the time before that was 8 months ago when a friend hugged you goodbye for what I think might have been the last time.
It’s not that being alone is bad or depressing, at least, not for me. There’s a deep calming peace about understanding what it truly means to be alone.
But it is emotionally isolating.
For someone who grew up with no self-worth and with the people closest to them actively making fun of their interests and telling them how worthless they were, it used to be dangerous for me to go alone, meaning I was the danger to myself. Well, actually, as a kid, getting away from everything for a few hours was fantastic, but as a teenager frequently left alone for days and as an adult who was often lonely even when people were around, that’s when it was dangerous for me.
These days it’s peaceful.
I have a much better sense of self. I know what I’m capable of, what my worth is, and I’m developing a sense of who I am. I know I’m not perfect, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d make fun of the things I enjoy, but I don’t care about them. I like what I like, and nobody can take away my joy.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to share it with somebody.
Actually, it probably means I do want to, more than ever, since I finally have something to share. But I also don’t want to give it away without enjoying it myself. It’s nice to sit quietly and just think. Sometimes it’s a little bit difficult to find the energy to do anything, and it’s not because of depression, it’s actually because of the healing. Let me explain:
The parts of me that still want to raise a middle finger to the past are also the parts that are so scared of failing that they don’t even want to try. They’re worried about about feeling ashamed and embarrassed the way they did when we were made fun of as a child. But the parts of me that are slowly healing end up holding those other parts of me, and although that makes it okay, it also takes away most of my emotional and cognitive energy from whatever is left over from my job. That’s why it’s so hard to do anything sometimes.
But I guess that means I am doing something. I’m healing.
It’s frustrating to be almost 46 and realize that I have so much healing to do. But it’s also amazing and beautiful to be on the path with it and to have the privilege to do the emotional work in comfort and safety.
I keep reminding myself of the fact that the frustration just means that I’m impatient to live, and that in itself is a huge step in the right direction.
Ultimately, being alone is allowing me to hear myself in ways I was always scared of. Scared that I wouldn’t know how to help myself, or scared that I would but not in a healthy way.
These days I’m slowly unfurling in the loneliness and finding out who I truly am.