How To Remember That You’re Not Alone, Even When It Really Feels Like You Are

Loneliness is what happens when you convince yourself that you’re no longer worth connection.

You know how to spread your arms across cool sheets at night. You know how to drive with the windows down, letting the cadences of your favorite songs move through you. You know the tranquil peace of slowly setting yourself into a warm bath. You know the strange charm of walking around by yourself, gazing upwards and imagining the stories of the city.

You know that it is only ever in solitude that we extract the most important truths about our lives. Without the expectations of others around us, we get to see who we most essentially are.

You know what it is to be alone.

It is not lonesomeness that gives you that pinching and panicked feeling.

It’s loneliness, which sounds the same, but is actually different.

Loneliness is what happens when you convince yourself that you’re no longer worth connection. Loneliness is what happens when you disbelieve that love is something you get when you’re good enough, something you receive when you play by the specific and unrelenting rules of those you’re most invested in receiving it from.

What type of connection, though?

Connection is the free flowing state of sharing presence with one another, and more people would want to do it with you than you’d probably assume. Connection is recognizing that even when life hands you a season of loneliness, you are never completely disconnected.

We all assume that because we live in such a hyper-connected society, we would be less lonely than ever. We can not only keep in touch with everyone we’ve ever known, but we can witness every detail of their lives unfold before us. No human beings prior to this ever experienced society in such a way.

That’s exactly the problem.

What we gain in “connection,” we lose in context.

People used to move on from old towns and groups and friends, catching up now and again, but generally reserving the intimate details of their lives for those who grew in alignment with them.

This is healthy because it gives us space to find new identities instead of being stuck trying to appease all of the different ones we constructed, that have come together all at once, to witness how we are today.

We feel most alone when we are strangers to ourselves, and in a world where everyone is watching, we are more pieces of what they would want us to be than the whole of what we want to become.

We don’t know where we fit because our ideas of ourselves are bound up in expectations. We have different faces for different people and somewhere throughout the constant pressure to be something else, we lose something.

It’s about that real connection, which is the willingness to show up exactly as we are, and and realizing we’re being met exactly where we are.

When we have this type of authentic connection, we end up discovering a sense of unity that we could never piece together from staring at vignettes of someone’s life. We begin to understand that those creeping doubts, subtle fears, deep curiosities — they’re universal. For how different we are and how much our experiences may vary, there is no human experience that you can have that someone else has not had at least a similar version of.

Coming to this realization is simple, but hard.
We have to truly see through the guise of what we thought connection was in an effort to foster it in reality.
We have to truly let go of trying to appeal to every person imaginable in an effort to come home to ourselves.

When life hands us a season of being by ourselves, we have to find the courage to sleep alone and eat alone and dance in the kitchen in our underwear and lay in bed at night and wonder if we are going to be okay.

We do not earn a connection.

In the words of Mary Oliver, “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Try to find love for the moments that life has given you to be alone.
Try to find love as you remember that you are already a piece of something far bigger than you, from where you came and where you will return.

Try to find love in the fact that maybe you’re being given an opportunity to be introduced to yourself, so that you might be able to introduce that person to someone else.

And maybe that was the piece missing all along.