What is loneliness?
Loneliness is something every human has felt at some point in his life.
It’s as real as a pen, as dirt, as a flower, as a paper cut. It simply is a part of the human condition. It’s a feeling that, despite making you the weakest being of them all existent on the face of the earth at one particular moment it also helps you become a stronger person. It makes you discover things about you that you didn’t know or that you never paid attention to.
How does loneliness occur?
Be it after a break-up, after someone’s death, after moving to a different city/country, after initiating a new perspective in your life, due to lack of affection or even for no reason comprehensible. Loneliness happens.
Friendship: You can be at a party with all your friends, watching how everybody is having a good time, laughing, enjoying themselves...but still you grab a beer, watch them have fun, share an occasional smile and be completely and utterly empty on the inside.
Habit: You can be in your new apartment, cleaning your room and asking your mother for a glass of orange juice from the kitchen. But when you get no response you suddenly realize that there’s nobody to give it to you and you have to get it yourself.
Love: After a recent break-up, with the person you thought you would spend your whole life with. The one person that knew you best, that you shared so much with yet betrayed you; that someone suddenly isn’t there anymore. So you’re lying in bed all by yourself but still leaving that persons side free and draw your hand across that side of the sheets… You’re perfectly aware that you haven’t changed those sheets in weeks but you know why. Because they still smell like that person. So you grab the pillow, squeeze it to your chest and start crying with flashbacks of all the beautiful moments you’ve spent together. All the plans you had together, all the places you wanted to go… Even that small house down the corner that you wanted to buy, yes even that shows up in your mind. Then, you simply break down with the though of how kissing that person felt, how…for one small second the world seemed a better place.
Work: You own a company, that runs pretty well, have success over success, you look at the reviews, but … there is no pride, there is nothing. Not even a person to share that success with.
Death: You drive by the bench you first had your knee injured, because you were running fast to catch up on your father. You pull over and walk to that place. You’re passed your 30’s but you still remember it like it was yesterday. Your father ran to you to pick you up and you both went to the store to buy some candy. That store isn’t there anymore, they built a fancy hotel instead, years after that. But you look around… See how things changed, take your phone out to look at the clock and see it’s 2 in the afternoon. Remember the first phone you ever had? A big black phone that kids used to make fun of back in middle school, but you would still walk around proud and wait for your fathers call, at 2:00 PM. Every single day.How do we deal with it?
That’s up to you.
You can: drink it off; keep it inside and let it eat you alive; share your pain with whoever is close to you or even a stranger you might never see again; cry and hope time will heal it; smile and pretend everything is fine; do something you enjoy, take a walk, buy something, feed a hungry dog or a cat, even a poor person, do something good, to make you feel worthy or to make you appreciate the small things.
All I can really say is that we’ve all been there, more than once. Everybody knows or has a slight idea about “loneliness”. We might have different views upon the term, we might see it as physical loneliness or emotional one, we might see it as a war with ourselves or with the others but we all know that after the feelings gone, we’re a bit more stronger than we were before.
