I don't think I'm more lonely then most people. I have a loving family and some good friends that drags me around. I go to school. I go to work. But I am single and I am living alone in my 46^2 apartment. So, when I wake up I'm as alone as when I go to sleep. This half year has been my first ever half year of me actually living without a roommate, a shared kitchen and without a community in that way, so I think it would be healthy for me to reflect on the experience. I'm writing this in my apartment right now. My walls could be thought of as poorly decorated as their whiteness reflect the sunshine from outside brightly. The buzzings of my refrigerator has became a synonym for silence and the brick wall, the blue sky, the birds building a bird house and my down in the dumps neighbors outside of my kitchen window becomes a synonym for the rest of the world. That's the basic frame of my loneliness that we shall now dwell in.
In my mind's eye
One thing that I have to confess right of the bat is that I do rarely suffer when I'm lonely. I actually do not feel that alone, especially not now when my computer is out and every social connection that I would ever care to have is some short clicks away (at least the text based kind). When I do accept my loneliness I start to feel a slight tingle in my spine. If I would been as usual knees deep in one of my projects then I would not have felt it. There is something primarily scary about letting the feeling run it's natural course. There is some vivid pictures of the more dangerous implications of loneliness that tries to grapple its way out of my subconscious. One is the face of a ghoul, and something that if you have read my blog post you know I have a past fighting. The ghoul is my fright loosing touch with reality, that I will reach an schizophrenic state with none there to catch me. Another fright is taking the mental form of a fire coming from my oven. I think that one is more socially derived from my parents as they can't sleep without going through the oven's buttons a hundred times in a row before going to sleep. Maybe that fear is more common if you are not living with yourself though, as my sister that do live with her boyfriend has this fear very much in her. They are still interconnected in the personal responsibility I have towards others.
I don't know what fear is the most dominant though, the fear that my loneliness will make me loose touch with the people I love or that my loneliness makes me have to depend solely on my own for survival. I guess there is a lack of confidence I have of myself in some aspects of it. As I said, l'm drawn think about fairly trippy stuff, a lot that involves the interconnection between magic, entities and human psychology. I'm scared that if you leave me alone with these thoughts long enough that I will truly became this wandering alien, disconnected from my fellow humans. And If there is something that psychoanalyst has taught me is the very real possibility of that. The fear of being solely depended on your own is a dangerous one though, because it is in a fundamental way misguided. Because there really is at the end of the day only one person that will feed me and keep me clean and happy, and that is mister me. The notion to fully transcendence the fear of self-authority has been described multiple times to be the one transformation crucial to actually becoming an adult.
A more social psychologist approach
There is though some less spooky aspects of being alone that I want to talk about. It's empirically evident to me that every time you talk with someone after a time of isolation that conversation will royally suck. In fact it usually takes almost up to an entire day of straight up talking before I feel like I'm comfortable in the social hemisphere again. There is off course nothing weird about this, it's only natural that you loose what you do not practice. But I think that it's annoying that having a conversation with another is so multidimensional and shifty that in my experience you can not really practice it in your mind or by reading books or listening to podcast. To really be with another person is a skill that you have to build up in ways that we do not have any proper words for, micro signals that have to come in perfect timings to signal that you are something in the line of trustworthy.
One annoying aspect about it for me is that I do not really want to talk with people when I have gotten in the productive yet narcissistic loneliness rhythm. Now that is probably more or less just social anxiety with a different mask, but not all of the time. It actually hurts to have a bad social interaction. Especially when I have been doing a lot reading that has inflated my ego and made me feel like mister smarty pants. Then you do not want to face the reality when the ideas that you fell in love with by yourself turns into a stuttering mess. And sometimes you realize that you were just completely wrong or delusional. I think a lot of the pains comes from that I forgot how to relax in another's company. My feelings are reacting at everything, and always in a defensive way. I think that's it's important to have in mind that i'ts not what you say when you are social that is the key, it's how you say it. And a relaxed, stable, human being can almost say nothing wrong. Especially if you feel that she is always comfortable to keep that stability in a fight. The aspect that get's lost when you are that stable is the fundamental learning process that more or less is eternally intervened with pain and chaos. Oh well.
Letting the feeling run it's course
I have not yet felt complete loneliness as I have been writing this blog post. I thought I wanted to step back a little and do that just now. As a closer.
I think it's hard to know what state is loneliness. One judge in me want to say that loneliness main component is fear and if I do not feel fear I do not feel truly loneliness. Which rings true in some way. When I indulge in books I'm sometimes driven by the fear of not being alone. But I think that saying that loneliness just can be felt through fear is undermining my own confidence. When I now sat silently in my sofa there was also a feeling of release in me. It's feeling with less character but it was still there. I felt strong in my own skin, I could, at least for a little time, look into that abyss and feel good. Maybe the fear is a product of a belief that it will always be like this. That I'm in jail. A silly fantasy.
One thing that you do not want to realize in the loneliness is that you have been fooling yourself the whole time. You have been running so fast that you have missed what is important. You notice, as I did, that you have not cleaned away a box of Monopoly, a game that you hate. That's a little painful, admitting that something have slipped by. Loneliness therefore is the predisposition to searching. Or no, the acceptance of loneliness, that you have it worse then you can have, is a predisposition to searching. But can't loneliness be a pleasurable thing in its own right? I hope so. What I know is that I want to be more mindful and front to myself of when I am lonely and how that feels like to me. There is definitely something to be learned in the abyss, without thinking that someone will look back at you. Because the truth is that I am alone, right now.
Maybe it's has always been much more about where you are alone then if are so. Because if you truly are at home in some bad places then that fact would be more horrible then if you were scared. Let's turn to the spook maestro Alice Cooper for an elaboration on that.