7 Billion people, and then there’s me.
My silent battle against loneliness.
I am painfully introverted. I spent most of my time alone and I am okay with it. I’m okay with going out to buy groceries alone, with eating in a crowded fast food restaurant alone and traveling alone. I value my solitude more than any other else but here’s the truth. All those times that I spent being alone, there’s a nagging voice like a broken tape on the back of my mind convincing myself that “I am not lonely.”
I love being alone and it doesn’t make me lonely in the very least. Or does it?
While sitting in a cafe one day, watching the people as they come and go about their lives, I asked myself out of nowhere. “Why do I love being alone?” I asked questions like this to somehow psychoanalyze myself because I am addicted to the mathematics of psychology and I do believe that knowing the basics helps a lot in improving one’s life. So why do I actually love being alone?
Surprisingly, based on my self-observation, the answer was counter-intuitive. I don’t love being alone. I prefer to be alone and it is because I lack self-worth. I suck as a human being. My “aloneness” was driven by my ego as high as redwoods.
I am painfully egotistic and it drives me to lock myself out of human interaction and hinders me from engaging in genuine relationships with other people. Even with my family and close friends. I was the moral, conceited alien that avoids people because they’re stupid. I don’t go about it loudly though. I’m far from looking like an ill-mannered pompous creature. I was the humble egotist.
I remember writing a note down while I was looking out of the window watching the heavy traffic. I wrote down, “Oh my God, what happened to earth?” What happened to people?” I said it like I wasn’t one of the people and wasn’t part of the planet. I act like I had it all figured out. I was never vulnerable in front of people. I hold myself too tight inside until I woke up one day with a heavy feeling of complete emptiness and loneliness.
As what Sylvia Plath in her Autobiographical book “The Bell Jar” puts it,
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
It feels like that. I don’t know how to jolt myself out of that nightmare and I succumb to my vulnerability alone. I cried for the end of me.
During those times of utter mediocrity, I know I have to survive. I wanted to crawl out of the situation so I became my own therapist. I asked myself questions, I started assessing where my emotions came from and I look for possible ways on how to cope. I looked back from when I was a kid and didn’t know what loneliness feels like and worked my way forward to find out where the lapses started and here’s what I found: Two factors that had a huge effect on me and the result ripples all throughout as I grow up.
I was bullied
I was a victim of bullying from early grade school days until I graduated. My friends, closest friends, and even a few teachers bullied me during grade school and that was probably the main reason I became a doubter. I grow up anxious about everything. My trust and relationships with people were built on a shaky foundation. I know I couldn’t trust anybody.
I was shut off
My parents shut me off. I am not going to put the blame entirely on them because they didn’t know I was that sensitive and parents are not perfect. But that did have a great impact on me. I remember running home one day, crying because I was bullied by some kids in the playground. I told my mom about it, expecting her to go after the bully and haul him over the coals.
“He’d be toast when mom finds out.”
That was what I had in mind. But to my surprise, mom shut me off. She was probably tired that day because she told me to ignore the bully. Eventually, I learned the art of shutting up. Maybe I was just being immature. I held it in and suppress everything.
I grew up doing just like that. Suppressing everything, doubting everything, shrugging everything off. At an early age, I was brainwashed with the thought that being vulnerable was immature.
There are a lot of studies done by researchers and psychologists concerning the psychological consequences of emotional abuse, isolation, and neglect among children. American Psychiatrist Bruce Perry has done some research regarding childhood crisis and brain development. He stated that:
“Childhood abuse and neglect can impact a child’s emotional development. Lack of emotional attachment in childhood, also affects relationships later in life and can make it difficult to trust others. Fear is often expressed and felt without always understanding why.”
It’s going to be hard for me to break away from the crippling isolation and loneliness that I am trapped in. I am not holding it against my parents or to the bullies. If anything else, I want to let everything go and start again from scratch. I have been scarred by my past experiences but those are what led me to become the person that I am and I believe in no time, the wounds are going to heal. Knowing the why’s is a sure step towards learning the how’s.
I am not the only lonely person in the world. Among the 7 billion, there’s me, then there’s you. And that person right there, or that guy or that girl. This battle will always feel like an uphill struggle. If you are feeling the same way, please say it. Be vulnerable. Win against it and know that the past is not all that there is.
