Iâve been trying for awhile to accurately describe the feeling of loneliness. Each time it feels like Iâm missing something. I never come close enough. Itâs a tricky one. Itâs not as expressive as sadness is. Doesnât gut you, slice you open the way grief does. Loneliness works differently, it doesnât slap you in the face like anger or jealously. It takes time penetrating your life. You ever have a friend that you didnât particularly like? You donât know how you became friends. It seems like theyâve always been around. Not sure why. Not sure the moment they went from stranger to a contact in your phone. Loneliness is like that. Yeah, like an invader that moved so slowly, you didnât even notice. I guess it just sits there, like some bruise thatâs so close to being healed. Sometimes you think itâs gone. If you stay distracted, plugged in, never fully present, you might not feel it at all. But like a bruise, if you touch it youâll wince. Youâll be reminded itâs still there. In my experience, loneliness rarely has to to do with being alone. Sure, that might amplify it, but itâs never the root cause. Loneliness shows up when you forget yourself. Itâs present on the nights you feel like a stranger in your own body and you wonder how long youâve been on autopilot. On those nights, youâll ask yourself, âhave I always been this lonely?â When it becomes too much, on the bad nights, youâll look for immediate distractions. Weâre good at that, us humans. Weâve figured out how to be so plugged in all the time. Weâll numb ourselves with food or alcohol or superficial connection. Weâll text someone we shouldnât. Weâll binge watch shows on Netflix until the screen is forced to ask, âare you still watching?â On those nights, youâll hate admitting just how lonely you really are. It feels like a failure of sorts. Because loneliness, unlike sadness or anger, is harder to figure out. Why do we feel this way? How can we fix it? Iâm still not sure I know the answers to those questions, but I do know loneliness does not go away if you just ignore it. It sits. It waits. It stays tucked away for the next bad night. The next night you lower your defences. Perhaps there is a feeling of unity in our loneliness. That even in our most isolated, in our pangs of pure lonely, we can know that others are feeling that way too. Maybe we should talk more of our loneliness. Maybe thatâs how we take itâs power away. We share, we grieve together, we try to understand this feeling. I wonder how many of us are hurting right now. I wonder how many of us are afraid to let the world know just how lonely these nights can be. Sometimes I feel like ripping apart my skin and searching for a reason why I feel the way I do. So empty. Maybe my veins are tangled, or maybe something is lodged in my rib cage. Because it feels like something inside of me is missing or broken and I would give all the money in the world to find that missing piece.
my random 2am thoughts (via confusedmillennials)
