A Brief Post About Loneliness
This is a post about loneliness. Not romantic loneliness, but sheer human loneliness. The desire for companionship, for understanding. The loneliness of the wee hours of the night, the loneliness of Sunday morning.
Can an introvert get lonely? I find it takes about two days of not speaking to another human being. A sense of disconnection, a sense of not being understood - or even being mocked - makes it a thousand times worse. ("You don't make it easy on yourself" is the refrain there - erm, what am I supposed to do? Be someone other than who I am? Do you think I *choose* to be this way, the same way that people perversely "choose" to be born homosexual or black or female or just plain different?)
I can't even begin to explain the sense of isolation. No family - well, what little I have are far-flung across the globe, and negotiating a family meet-up requires more diplomacy than the cautious maneuvers of three empires. I want to be Switzerland, but neutrality must be defended with guns and knives and mining all the bridges on my mountain passes.
My friends, my lovely friends? Far flung, even further flung than my family. Even when they live in the same city (and never forget that getting from one side of London to the other can take an hour, or two, longer than it takes to get to another country sometimes.) lives drift apart.
It's the story of my life. Friends grow up, they meet partners, they get married, they have babies, and it's like they've gone off into another world, one where you can never follow. I didn't move with the rest of my age group, I got somehow stuck. I made different choices, I was a different person, I followed different dreams. And it never happened for me - or rather, it did, but not in a form that I ever found acceptable. One life-partner abused me, the other betrayed and abandoned me. And it still doesn't change the hard-learned fact that I was, actually, lonelier *in* these relationships than I had ever been out of them.
So my friends move on, and I stick. My new friends get younger and younger - or rather, they stay the same age, and I grow older. And of course the cycle happens all over again. This is what appeals in fictional characterisations of the immortal, be it Vampire novels or Doctor Who. Everyone you love will grow old and die, and you will simply carry on, lonely as you ever were. Except they don't die, they go on to have new lives, in a different place, without you, and you can only ever watch, with your nose pressed up against the glass that separates you.
From the outside I know that I look so bitter and so angry. How many times can one go through the same bitter and disappointing experience before you are *allowed* to be angry? Once? Twice? A dozen times? A hundred?
And Sunday mornings are so lonely, so still and so silent as to be almost unendurable. And yet, endure you must. What's the alternative?
Can an introvert get lonely? I find it takes about two days of not speaking to another human being. A sense of disconnection, a sense of not being understood - or even being mocked - makes it a thousand times worse. ("You don't make it easy on yourself" is the refrain there - erm, what am I supposed to do? Be someone other than who I am? Do you think I *choose* to be this way, the same way that people perversely "choose" to be born homosexual or black or female or just plain different?)
I can't even begin to explain the sense of isolation. No family - well, what little I have are far-flung across the globe, and negotiating a family meet-up requires more diplomacy than the cautious maneuvers of three empires. I want to be Switzerland, but neutrality must be defended with guns and knives and mining all the bridges on my mountain passes.
My friends, my lovely friends? Far flung, even further flung than my family. Even when they live in the same city (and never forget that getting from one side of London to the other can take an hour, or two, longer than it takes to get to another country sometimes.) lives drift apart.
It's the story of my life. Friends grow up, they meet partners, they get married, they have babies, and it's like they've gone off into another world, one where you can never follow. I didn't move with the rest of my age group, I got somehow stuck. I made different choices, I was a different person, I followed different dreams. And it never happened for me - or rather, it did, but not in a form that I ever found acceptable. One life-partner abused me, the other betrayed and abandoned me. And it still doesn't change the hard-learned fact that I was, actually, lonelier *in* these relationships than I had ever been out of them.
So my friends move on, and I stick. My new friends get younger and younger - or rather, they stay the same age, and I grow older. And of course the cycle happens all over again. This is what appeals in fictional characterisations of the immortal, be it Vampire novels or Doctor Who. Everyone you love will grow old and die, and you will simply carry on, lonely as you ever were. Except they don't die, they go on to have new lives, in a different place, without you, and you can only ever watch, with your nose pressed up against the glass that separates you.
From the outside I know that I look so bitter and so angry. How many times can one go through the same bitter and disappointing experience before you are *allowed* to be angry? Once? Twice? A dozen times? A hundred?
And Sunday mornings are so lonely, so still and so silent as to be almost unendurable. And yet, endure you must. What's the alternative?
Labels: angst, depression, loneliness, self-pity
posted by Masonic Boom | 8:59 am
2 Comments:
aw, dude. i'm in chislehurst at my parents' place today. i wish there was some way you could get over here to chislehurst or bromley or whatever. but i just tfl'd it and you'd need to go into london bridge and then back down again. navigating south london is a nightmare, isn't it? i feel kind of lonely in poplar sometimes. this city is too big. frances is in tottenham, lisa's in walthamstow. we might as well all be in separate villages. well, we are really aren't we? how does one find really local friends? because that's what i want.
We are so far flung out, it's like we don't even all live in the same city. They didn't think of this when they came up with that "when a man is tired of London he'd tired of life itself" quote. I'm so sick of living so far away from the people I love.
I have one local friend! Who I met through the music scene, because we always saw each other on the same night bus after gigs. Maybe I should make more of an effort to meet people locally - but that would involve either going to 1) yuppie bars or 2) Polish heavy metal bands.
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