The thin line between being alone and feeling lonely

“Loneliness and aloneness stand as the two pillars to the one, emotional pendulum.”

I was halfway through with this post when I found the above quote from an article on the same topic in Thought Catalog. Maybe they are two pillars to the same pendulum. One pillar is an opportunity, another is an illusion. What if we could hold the pendulum at one end, the better one?

I seemed to have written a detailed account in my old journal, about the pattern of how I become lonely during every summer break. How it all starts with excitement and freedom, and then ends up in the well-known “An idle mind is a devil’s workshop” situation.

There it comes, that loneliness. Its a greedy black hole that sucks up all happiness, leaving behind everything sad. It unnecessarily dissolves the foundations of trust. Speculations and hallucinations. “Everyone hates you, don’t they?” says the devil in our heads. And we know that there’s absolutely no need for those tears, but we cry anyway.

What we don’t notice is the beauty of being alone. It’s just us. No one is interfering or changing the wirings in our brains. We can hear our thoughts. We can lose ourselves in a book or a movie or melodious music. We’re never too young or too old to personalize your way of being alone.

I am alone now. Not lonely, I can tell. Because if I were lonely, I would be moping in self pity right now. I can tell that I’m not lonely, because I’ve currently found some things to be preoccupied with. Therefore, could being alone mean being preoccupied? In that case we may never be alone because there would always be a preoccupation tagging along with us. If that preoccupation is self pity and pessimism, then we could say that loneliness is a subsect of being alone.

As we grow older and as more people leave our lives, we realize that we are, in fact, alone. We were meant to be alone, selfish, independent, promisingly balanced with being and interacting with people.

So, to all those young people out there, find your way of being alone. Don’t be fooled by the illusion of loneliness.