Being Alone vs. Feeling Alone
The thought of loneliness is one which is accompanied by notions of fear and a need of escapism. After all, when we are being by our parents and we grow up, we are told to make friends everywhere we go and go outside to play with other people, join their game of soccer on the playground, so that we do not have to be by ourselves. The more we are invited to birthday parties and events, the more we can value ourselves as a functioning branch of society. It is a strange narrative, and yet it is a necessary one for us to understand. I found it helpful when growing up, to have sense of belonging in a group. But as I grew older and am now in the 23rd year of my life, I often find myself looking back into the past, wondering what I would have done differently than my parents. And while there are many things they did for me for which I will be eternally grateful to them, there is a fundamental one that I who wants to have children some day, have I found to be in need for variation when it is my turn. And that is the fact of how to handle loneliness. I argue that there are two components to being alone: There is the feeling and then there is the choice. And where these two merge, there is the beauty.
Feeling Alone
There is a difference between mental and physical states of Being. Feeling alone for that matter, can present to be an infinitely more challenging experience than its physical counterpart. Though our outer situations and environments may shape our perceptions, we often find ourselves lost on a clear stretch, and alone in a crowded space from which we are supposed to gain a feeling of comfort and community, but too often than we want, we in fact succumb to the opposite. When taking about the feeling of solitude, we have to pull from two set strings. For one, it is the fact that feeling alone is no defined denominator of a command towards negative thinking, and secondly, that it is necessary to re-evaluate the mental disorder we are being exposed to in an age of constant information flow and continuous movement of thoughts and actions as I write and you read those words. And through the considering of these both halves, we can understand what feeling alone really means. The moment of waking up in the early morning before having to go to your job. That time when everyone around you is losing their head and you do not know why. And that one event where everyone had a partner to run towards while you find yourself repeatedly crying into a pillow wishing for what they have. It´s a moment of sadness, of confusion, anger and fear. But mostly, it is a moment with yourself. And frankly, once you undergo those moments, you are not aware that you are in the best company you could be since you are veiled in negative self-talk and nihilistic thinking.
“Why am I not good enough? Where is my shining light? Why me?”
I could go on and on. These causal functions serve only the purpose of making you feel more miserable than they already do.
Dostoevsky once responded to the question when he was asked what he dreaded: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
So it is the suffering of man, that offers him immense opportunities — to achieve spiritual freedom — inner liberty (that which cannot be taken away from him) / to understand the deeper meaning to his life / to understand the ‘why’ for his existence that will make his life purposeful / to realize and answer the call of potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him / to grow as a human being / to achieve unbreakable inner strength.
The feeling of solitude is one which bears great potential, however this potential is too often omitted by the individual for the sake of avoiding to confront the suffering. So we tend to forging hurtful and deliberately stupid bonds just to evade asking ourselves the ever so pressing question:
Posing this question is a horrible one to contemplate on, because it demands from us that we confront every last bit of weakness with brutal honesty and transparency. But here is where I found my potential in the darkness, and the guiding hand in the solitude. If you want to be a luminous figure for the people around you, if I want to be loved, which is a deep desire of most of us, then I have to learn to love myself first and I have to light the torch on my own without extinguishing it by the panic emerging from the hasty desire of wanting to escape the loneliness. Here is my hard pill to swallow for the day for you:
You do not deserve any kind of joyous, healthy or good company if you cannot be comfortable on your own. What are you going to bring to the table if you do not even know who you are and what you stand for? Nothing productive, that is for sure. And you are likely to either try to comfort to a group identity which is the last thing you should want if you are trying to find yourself as it will drag you further away from “Yourself” than it possibly can, or you will realize then and there, that you are insufficient in the group, and getting hit in the head with a shovel by surprise is going to do a lot more damage than preparing for the hit right hook of an existential crisis. So you would do really well in exposing yourself to the feeling of loneliness voluntarily and remaining vigilant rather than running around and receiving the kick to the teeth when you least expect it. Believe me, it will come. But knowing that, I want to aspire to be ready to take the hit than getting knocked out in the first round. And that is where I decided to be alone on purpose. Here is where my story chimes back in. For me, being alone was something of its own kind. So, what have I learned from it?
Being Alone
I always saw my journey towards my high school graduation as a heroic story.
I was never a very popular kid and most of the time bathed in the reputation of an underdog. To this day, I often try to cover up situation of insecurity and discomfort by making jokes and making people laugh rather than confronting the serious nature of a situation. And while laughter always wins the long game, there are situations where I still have to learn, the humour is not always appropriate. It can even lead you further down the path you were trying to avoid in the first place without you even knowing it. A person´s strength remains also their greatest weakness. And my greatest weakness and strength at the same time has become the ability of being alone. And even though, this depiction is of a very narcissistic nature, it helped me understand myself a lot more, and I hope it will do the same for you. Let me introduce you to the concept of the Hero´s Journey.
What do the archetypal heroes of our famous tales have in common? They were not born like this, and they too had to overcome a journey through the so-called “Special World” to become the hero who we know them for. Frodo had to carry the One Ring to Mount Doom, Luke Skywalker had to resist the temptation of falling to the dark side when confronting his father and the Emperor on the second Death Star, and Harry Potter had to learn to control his anger over his past to be able to defeat the present threats. Every hero has a moment of darkness, a Jungian shadow which he incorporates into their Being. And they all have the moment of solitude and loneliness. But at the point where they realize that they are in control of their response, that is when Feeling Alone turns into Being Alone.
The hero knows he is where he is due to his decisions and adopts responsibility for his situation by falling back on a specific behavioral pattern which we can associate with the Good. Luke Skywalker throws his light saber down the corridor and refuses to fight, and Frodo, with a little help, rids himself of the incredible burden of The Ring. As soon as the hero realizes that he is in sole control of his response, the questions “Why am I not good enough? Where is my shining light? Why me?” turn into “I am in control. I am the light. Try me!” There is no more frantic search for answers to questions we cannot answer, but rather the willingness to seek the answers within our own nature. The question “Who Am I?” then will begin to answer itself as the hero continuously tries to make friends with the crisis he faces and seek company with his own heart rather than with other people´s minds.
I have found that I am only able to enjoy other people´s company once I learned how to embrace my full personality. Not only the strengths, but also the weaknesses resulting thereof. I chose to be alone the past three months prior to my stay in Finland and after my break up to be able to finally confront the darkness rather than hiding from as I had previously done during the time of my previous relationship. It was a move of fear and weakness, but it was a necessary one as it enable me with the paranoia to finally figure embark on the journey of figuring myself out once the clock hit June 20th 218. And though my journal entries are as ambiguous as Ying and Yang, they stand as a witness of how crucial it was that I decided to walk down this path.
The World Needs Your Light
To conclude, I want to give you a few advices on how to start to be comfortable with the darkness. It may seem innocuous at first to stay in your lane and just keep doing thins the way you know them, but I implore you to try out at least one of these steps and if you find them to be helpful for yourself, to keep doing them and see what happens.
- Write a journal. Every day. Even if it is just a few words. Put your thoughts, negative and positive in there and see what it does with you. Read more about it in this article.
- Wake up at 04:30am, go for a 30 minute walk and let your thoughts wander.
- When in a conversation, try to catch yourself how man times you actually are speaking your own mind vs. how much you just speak because you feel like you need to say something.
I am still not at the end of answering the question who I really am, and I believe I never will be, but I have managed to start walking down what I believe is the path of good. And I want you to try and do the same. Because as helpful as it is, feeling alone is ultimately the most dangerous route towards a nihilistic, self-loathing and resentful nature. And we already have enough of that in the world. We need light, we need harmony and we need positivity. We, I, You need you.
