The Beauty and Bitterness of Accepting Solitude
Being alone was unknown to me
I always feared the unknown, an indication and perhaps a reminder of how our brains work as humans. To be human is to sense a variant of emotions; joy, melancholy, rage and fear. My fears are what makes me belong yet also individualises me from others of my kind. They tend to be conventional in the eyes of society, sometimes irrational, but often accepted and related. Nevertheless, as I look at all of my fears as a whole, they all seem to correlate to my dismay for unfamiliarity.
Being alone was something unknown to me. I was constantly surrounded by people who make up the space of family, friends and just mere individuals. I love listening to the minds of others. It reminds me of my lack of loneliness. They make speeches and conversations, every articulation of words woven together to make up sentences that reflect the beauty of their minds. A prompting to the fact that we are always speaking to fill the silence, verbally or not.
Even so, it was a lie. A façade to my true isolation. I am constantly alone in my mind, no matter how noisy it gets. I talk to myself often, but only in my head because I fear rejection if I speak the truth. Ironically, I am alone because I fear being alone. I wondered if the presence of this feeling of rot and dust is more prominent in others than I assumed. That it is so powerful that we find ways to sweep it under the rug and bury it deep.
Are people as lonely as I am? Are we all lonely corpses simply sauntering around?
I believed I was alone because of how I grew up with the never-ending feeling of being misplaced. I believed I was alone because people say I’m foreign even though I speak their language. I believed I was alone because my romantic relationships never work out. I believed I was alone because I thought no one would want to spend the rest of their lives with me. I blamed myself for a lot of things. I saw solitude as a curse, but deserving.
As lonely as a tree in the middle of a wood, so is I among the people.
After failed relationships, I forced myself to accept this as my future. Perhaps inspired by the circumstances the entire world was shoved into. As depressing as it sounds, it was a lot more like a divine intervention of some sort. Everything became a lot clearer than it was. If I wasn’t so caught up in wanting to form relationships instead of fixing the ones I already had, I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion at an age I was expected to be in constant company. Solitude was once a curse, but now a blessing. A fresh sense of maturity.
I must first learn to belong to myself before I begin belonging to others.
In this world, we are all connected somehow. Whether through blood, relations, acquaintances, or phone calls. Yet, I am not sure if that defies the sadness and maybe the importance of solidarity. I may have come to an understanding about the reality of loneliness, but I can now comprehend that solitude will indefinitely be parallel to togetherness. Being alone is okay, but as people of society, forming human connections are essential to our ever growing dichotomous relationships with one another.
