The Loudness of Loneliness...

Sometimes loneliness is soft and feathery.  It barely touches your skin.  It lives in the periphery and feeds on something other than your soul.  Sometimes, though it is fierce and unyielding and all consuming.  It becomes very loud and crowds out all the other voices in your head.  And it devours you from the inside out.

For me, loneliness doesn’t happen often.  I am very content in my own company.  I mostly feel it at holidays when the loving vibrations feel like they just vibrate on past me.  I miss having someone to share them with and someone to climb into bed with at night and discuss the events of the day.  Perhaps I feel lonely at other times but it seems to escape my notice.

Most of the time, I am busy in my own life.  Consumed with things that bring me pleasure: work, gym, hiking, my family, friends, recovery, my pets.  It is a good life and most of the time I am engaged and go to bed each night grateful for the space that exists next to me.  When I look at my previous dating choices, the vacancy next to me becomes something I am immensely grateful for.

I talk to a lot of lonely people in my job.  A lot of people who are married to someone who is a stranger to them even though they occupy the most sacred space next to them every night.  That sacredness has been lost in the intervening years, and now what once was a passionate love affair has cooled to a hostile silence.  The passion chilled to almost frigid.  One wrong move and it shall shatter into tiny shards too broken to ever be healed.

What I have learned is that we as humans do not deal with loneliness well.  Oh we become accustomed to it.  We deal with it and allow it languish in our homes and hearts.  But we do not handle it well.  We really tend to panic.  Even though the results of that panic tend to be more internal than external.  But even the most internal panic can be viewed from outside if one looks closely enough:

We send the text

We answer the call

We open the app

We stay when leaving is the better option

We settle for less

We accept the breadcrumbs and pray for a full meal eventually

We go back to the person who half-loved us or perhaps we never left them at all

We do all of the above because the promise of connection, even if it eventually feels awful and slicing, feels better than the panic that resounds within us when we are lonely and lost and just need to feel the comfort of another body pressed against ours...even if that body faces the wall and we can only feel the other person’s back, or complete absence.  Sometimes, any attention feels better than the silence we feel when alone.

And for me, loneliness is something that descends upon me at the strangest times.  Holidays for sure.  I think I will always feel most alone at that time but also most unsettled by my single status.  There are other times I feel the acute pangs of loneliness drop in but for me, gratefully, those times are few and far between.  Most nights I go to bed.  Climbing into bed isn’t something that fans the flames of loneliness or longing. It is just an act I perform at the end of the day.  Most of the time, I am grateful there isn’t some asshole I have to deal with climbing  in next to me.  I know I accepted a lot of crap in my life all to maintain a connection that wasn’t worth the effort to begin with...perhaps I have been more lonely than I would like to admit and that is why I have allowed such assholes into that hallowed space in my bed?

I know I have allowed myself to feel disposable, empty, vacant and under appreciated a great deal in my relationships and for that I have no one to blame but myself.  It is hard to admit but I have picked those negligent fuckers every single time.  And I have called it love and loving when it really was anything but.

I like to think I have evolved past the acceptance of bullshit as love but I guess I won’t know until I allow someone close enough to occupy the space next to me.  And for now, it remains occupied by a varying parade of cats, a kid and a dog.  Which, I suppose, is as it should be.

I vacillate often about whether I am just destined to be single or whether my growth shall take me deeper with someone actually capable of that.  Honestly, I wish I could just land permanently in one camp, it is quite exhausting bouncing back and forth between the two.  It would be nice to just accept my aloneness and learn to enjoy it completely.  Letting go of the idea that some day there shall be someone to languish in bed with on Sunday mornings with coffee fueled conversation and hot sex.  I will admit that is an idea that is very hard for me to give up.

I have come a long way.  And today I wouldn’t trade where I am for any situationship or itinerant lover.  I have a great life and the loneliness and longing only kicks my ass every once in awhile.  The longing to curl up next to someone who gets you passes and it passes best when you don’t allow anyone into your inner sanctum or bed that hasn’t earned the right to be there.

Loneliness can be deafening.  But it can also be quiet and comfortable.  What I have learned is that loneliness isn’t something that is cured by another. But by how you talk to and love yourself.  For me, loneliness isn’t ever about them, it is always about how I am relating and loving me.

Again...still.