This is only my second post here on these forums. I don't remember what exactly brought me here, but when I ran into this little corner of the internet, something was so compelling about it. I thought it might help me to understand my strange loneliness. Strange, because I've always had a loving family, loving siblings, loving friends, a loving spouse that I met when I was 14 (I'm 32 now), and two wonderful little girls. What's more, I have a politician's personality: gregarious, smiling, and socially astute. Yet... I've been lonely my entire life, and I've never really understood why. It makes me wonder: there are so many people here who are trying to defeat their loneliness with some physical thing in this world, but I wonder whether for a few of us, that loneliness might be a fundamental part of who we are.
Sometimes loneliness lurches on me suddenly. I'll be hamming it up while I teach a class or while I laugh with my family, and someone will say some particular thing, and the loneliness will suddenly appear, like realizing that a dark but familiar stranger is in the corner of the room. At that moment, I feel utterly alone and alienated. Like some rock on a distant, lifeless rogue planet between stars. There is something eerily beautiful and terrible about that loneliness. Like the quiet, peaceful, stillness of death.
I'm tempted to call this loneliness "solitude" instead, but is solitude so unpleasant? When I feel this way, it brushes with a sort of distant, primal hopelessness and depression. When I feel lonely in this way, it reminds me of a cold night. So cold that the stars pierce at you, like needles. As you shiver in the cold, you want to go inside to escape the discomfort, but you also want to stay out and admire the beauty.
I've never expressed this to the people in my life, but behind the eternally smiling man with whom they are familiar, I know they sense it in me.
I don't know what it means, if anything. I just wanted to share it with people who might understand. There's a certain suitable, poetic irony in being together with others in your loneliness. And I thought this might be the place.
Sometimes loneliness lurches on me suddenly. I'll be hamming it up while I teach a class or while I laugh with my family, and someone will say some particular thing, and the loneliness will suddenly appear, like realizing that a dark but familiar stranger is in the corner of the room. At that moment, I feel utterly alone and alienated. Like some rock on a distant, lifeless rogue planet between stars. There is something eerily beautiful and terrible about that loneliness. Like the quiet, peaceful, stillness of death.
I'm tempted to call this loneliness "solitude" instead, but is solitude so unpleasant? When I feel this way, it brushes with a sort of distant, primal hopelessness and depression. When I feel lonely in this way, it reminds me of a cold night. So cold that the stars pierce at you, like needles. As you shiver in the cold, you want to go inside to escape the discomfort, but you also want to stay out and admire the beauty.
I've never expressed this to the people in my life, but behind the eternally smiling man with whom they are familiar, I know they sense it in me.
I don't know what it means, if anything. I just wanted to share it with people who might understand. There's a certain suitable, poetic irony in being together with others in your loneliness. And I thought this might be the place.
