Loneliness is not necessarily a negative thing... My personal journey

For a great deal of time in my life, I thought that being alone, that loneliness or the mere fact of ending up at some point in life with no one around me would be one of the worst things that could happen to me in life. After a series of situations that have happened to me in life, added to the intelligence that only years and experiences give you, several of those things have changed. In fact, the terror of loneliness is not something that only happens to me; it is very common, and very socially avoided...

Here, the important, the transcendental thing is to recognise where this dread comes from.... But I will come back to this idea later. For now, I will concentrate on delving into my deeper thoughts and reflections. How I found the positive function of being alone, of enjoying walks and ideas that before, generated anxiety, fear and paranoia. Life can be very confusing and changeable, that is inevitable. What defined us yesterday is now a mere memory of something we simply are no longer.

What do I mean by this? Basically, like Epicurus or Marcus Aurelius, certain things that have happened to me in the course of my life have marked a before and an after in terms of accepting a human emotional state that cannot be put off. In other words, at some point we will be alone; we had better get used to that idea as soon as possible. In my case, it was the break-up of one of the longest, and therefore most intense relationships I have ever experienced emotionally, coupled with the death of my mother years later....

Both events radically changed my fears. Before, I lived my life with an ambivalent attachment. I alternated episodes of anxiety and dependency with a terribly marked abandonment syndrome. It all stemmed from my own shortcomings, childhood traumas in my relationship with my mother and also from the refuge I chose as a child, in literature and cinema. For this reason, I idealised certain issues, which I thought (wrongly) were universally shared. Again, inexperience over reality.

Contemplating what I was, how I thought and how I imagined my understanding of the world, only changed after traumatic, difficult and very hard events: the loss was the trigger for the modification of my being. As the millenary teaching of the Stoic philosophers indicates, the intrinsic hardness of life itself disrupts what we believed as a perfect reality... Being a little more critical, I agree that it shouldn't come to such a transformative point in order to improve, but sometimes you have to learn the hard way.

My personal journey is like everyone's. We are born, we grow up, we experience it. We are born, we grow up, we experience and we base certain things that mark certain issues deep inside us. If I have learned anything, then, it is really to be more balanced. My personal growth has been through the understanding that only solitude gives you. I have not become radicalised. Which is something very common in people who, when experiencing pain, misunderstand what has happened to them. On the contrary, the key is to clarify one's own mistakes, modify behaviours and, above all, unlearn mistakes.

By the way, the photographs, from my perspective, show in part a walk that I always take every week to clear my head and enjoy a hobby such as capturing everyday life and normality. They are images that show the loneliness of something common, the street, a road, a park. In short, loneliness as a natural state of life, of which fear should not exist. Although we are social animals, as Aristotle said, it is no less true that contemplation and intelligence come from a state of solitude, of reflection, of deep thought? We are complex, like the mere fact of thinking. And I am far from perfection, and I like it that way.