Notes on Loneliness

Loneliness is possibly the worst feeling I have ever felt. It is easily the hardest thing to deal with- especially when the key to dealing with it is at the time living some 762 miles away and in a different time zone.

Honestly, I don’t know how men do it. They always have to be tough and independent. To admit loneliness for a man is like admitting that you’re homosexual. In other words, it could be worse, but it still sucks, and your friends give you funny looks. I could be wrong, but I’ve always been under the impression that men don’t confide in each other the way that women do. Men always seem to have a sort of pent up anger inside of them that they can’t get out. Maybe it’s because they’re lonely and they can never admit it.

The hardest thing about loneliness, I found, was admitting it to me. It was an acknowledgment of the hole inside of me- the hole that I could not fill. And perhaps the strangest thing about loneliness was that even after I admitted my loneliness to my closest friends, even after they promised me that all would be well and that I wouldn’t be alone forever, I still felt alone. I had been reassured that I wasn’t alone by the simple fact that my friends cared enough to talk with me. Yet still I felt alone.

Loneliness is hard to describe, probably due to the fact that I was never actually alone when I felt the feeling most acutely. I always had my roommate, my three best girl friends and a guy friend. My sisters were not far away, and my mother was always up for a phone conversation. This was how I discovered that there is one cure for loneliness. The cure may change over time, but at any given moment, there is only ever a single cure. That single cure is a person.

I think loneliness is also due to jealousy. I hate to admit that I have felt jealousy towards my friends, but to claim anything different would simply be a lie. Each of my friends had someone they could turn to who was fairly nearby. My cure was half-way across the nation, living an hour ahead of me, and busy beyond belief. In reality, the loneliness didn’t hit me until I realized the directions we were heading in. I realized that with the work schedule my cure was leaning towards, they would have almost no time at all to talk with me. I realized with a pained revelation that I was going to lose them.

Perhaps loneliness, while also being that empty feeling in the pit of your stomach that you somehow know is not hunger, is also a fear. It is a fear that things will never be how they used to be. “No matter how we try, we can’t go back,” as Margaret Hale said in BBC’s version of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Loneliness is a sort of ache. It’s an ache of heart, body and mind. I think loneliness and depression, as they do not go hand in hand, are often confused with each other. My sister, unaware of everything that was going in my life at the time, knowing only the fact that I didn’t like the school I was attending, diagnosed me with depression. Not serious depression, of course, but depression nonetheless. At that point, I would not say that I was lonely. The loneliness was kind enough to join me later in the year- about two and a half weeks later, to be precise.

Loneliness can be conquered to a point. It can be ignored, pushed aside by other work. It can be channeled into more useful things- such as stories that all of your friends say will be published, but deep down you know they never will, because you don’t have the courage to do it. Yes, loneliness can be pondered over and deeply analyzed like this, but personally I would not advise this method. Thinking too much on any given topic had proven to have very negative side effects- especially if you’re as bitter a person as I am. Also, listening to sad music is probably not the best solution. The best advice I can give is that you find your cure. Hopefully they will live in the same time zone as you. If not, do your best with what you can. Fight through every three days and be saved by them just before it all comes crashing down.

Be careful where you step, young one. The water is only shallow for so long.