Thank you, @cloudcore , for starting this extremely important discussion!
@cloudcore wrote:
Questions for the community:
- What does loneliness look like for you?
It would be all too easy for me to talk about the endless days and nights, sitting quietly in an empty room, dreaming dreams of crowded bars and/or living rooms, filled with comraderie and laughter.
All too easy to talk about the sense of emptiness and loss whenever you watch some show or movie where college-age youths are merrily strolling down sunny sidewalks together, their lives full of romance and close friendships.
All too easy to talk about all the uncomfortable dinners, sitting quietly and trying to keep to yourself, while half-drunk family members burble along in bitter rants about any arbitrary issue-of-the-day, which you don’t want to get caught up in.
All too easy to talk about the empty, cardless, mantlepiece in the weeks surrounding your birthday and Xmas; the staunch reminder that, not only do you have no friends or loved-ones to send you cards, but also that you have no one you are sincerely close to who you can write to.
All too easy to talk about the visceral sinking feeling in your gut, when you hear about someone much younger then you having gotten married or engaged; that frosty veiled telegram from reality that the lone hope that sustains you - of getting your own great romance and real family - is either dead, or at best, on it’s death bed.
All too easy to talk about the overwhelming sense of confusion, the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” unfairness of life, whenever you are confronted with any sort of confusing issue - be it social, ethical, practical, medical, financial, beaurocratic, or political - and you realize, yet again, that you have nobody you sincerely trust to turn to for advice or assistance in figuring the situation out. Or what it’s like to feel your lungs going haywire, where it feels like you can’t breathe, while your mind keeps screaming “WHAT THE F*** AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT THIS?”, and you realize that help is never coming.
Yes, it is far too easy to fall into the trap of describing the man who is literally sitting all alone in a room by himself - because that’s what we’ve all become accustomed to presuming loneliness looks like.
But I know from experiance that all that ugly crap is mere child’s play compared to the real loneliness that comes from being trapped in a populated environment full of people who are not on your side.
People who judge you and look down on you, based on criteria you can’t possibly comprehend.
People who hold you to some unwritten expectations, that they refuse to clarify, and then passively-aggressively lash out at you when you violate them. People who expect you to follow some script of desired responses, which they never provide you in advance.
People who seem to have collaborated to create a world that you would never want to live in; a world that varies only between the dreary & pointless, and the miserable & tragic - with no place for joy.
People who exploit your desperation for real connection and basic respect, to extort you into doing things you have no desire to do, and which you are never ultimately rewarded for. This includes therapists, who are supposedly charged with genuinely helping us to solve severe life crisises, such as loneliness.
People who seem to be committed to convincing you that human beings are actually quite horrid things, and that sitting in a room, in the presence of other people, is actually a much less desirable prospect then living out a long life and dying in an empty room, all alone.
People who heartlessly blame you for your own loneliness, on the premise that you refuse (or are unable) to contort yourself into a convincing falsehood that fits in well with their desires, when you know full well that the only true cure for loneliness is to be inserted into an environment where you can be yourself, and feel true connection and conformity with the people surrounding you.
That is what the worst of loneliness looks like. Loneliness isn’t the lord sitting in his empty, resonating chamber; loneliness is the lord waiting in his fortress under siege.
And if you have trouble believing that, just try spending an evening at a function where everyone thinks your “a loser”; an evening of non-stop awkward contempt and grudging tolerance. You’ll be thankful when it’s finally time to go back home to your empty bedroom. The burden is still there, but it’s much less weighty.
I want to address those other questions in the original post. But I'll do them in another post, because this one is already so big.
Once, I used to be able to go in to some situations with a presumption of welcomeness and safety, but then there'd be an unambiguous unkind remark or something similar, that would reveal how the people really felt about me.
)
