loneliness

What does it even mean? People tend to think that being surrounded by others, having hundreds of names stored on their phones and receiving constant little proofs of attention makes them less alone. Maybe sometimes it does. But if no one truly understands you, if no one can carry even a fraction of the weight of being you, how different are you from the person who has no one at all?

I had friends once and for a long time I mistook that for not being lonely. I had names I could call, people to laugh with, rooms in which I could temporarily disappear into the noise of other lives. And yet I was lonelier then than I am now. Their presence did not remove the emptiness. It merely furnished it.

Beneath all of that was something painful to accept: the old animal instinct to gather, to remain near whatever tribe will have us, to mistake closeness for understanding and to conform for safety. The connection was real in the way painkillers are real. It only worked temporarily, as long as you were willing to accept the side effects in exchange for forgetting the pain. But slowly the effects wore off and whatever had been waiting underneath was still there.

I can see that clearly now. Loneliness was never something that arrived and departed. It was fundamental. It had been built into me long before I noticed it. Maybe loneliness is the natural condition of consciousness. To be human is to be sealed inside a perspective no one else can completely enter. We can try to describe ourselves, confess, touch, love, surrender pieces of ourselves to others but that transmission between us always loses something. There is always some error, some mismatch.

No matter how deeply someone cares, they cannot see the world exactly as you do. They cannot feel your fear with precisely your nervous system or receive your experience before language has altered it. And if they somehow could, would that finally eradicate loneliness? Or would loneliness simply move somewhere deeper?

Our desire to be known never really disappears. But the wrong kind of connection is worse than loneliness. It can deceive you into believing that you are no longer lonely. It becomes a slow erosion: compromises made so gradually that you do not notice which parts of yourself have gone missing. We search for people because isolation hurts, then sometimes mutilate ourselves into shapes that fit beside them.

Those could be the two cruelest possibilities: to remain alone or to become less yourself in order not to feel alone. But which is worse? Accepting that some distance between people may be permanent or spending a lifetime covering that distance with relationships, routines and distractions until you can almost pretend it is gone?

Still, some part of me refuses to stop wondering. What if another person understood you so completely that nothing had to be explained, softened, performed or hidden? With billions of people in the world, how impossible could that really be? But if you found that person, would that be the greatest relief imaginable? Would it finally quiet whatever keeps reaching outward? Or would even that decay with familiarity?

Would perfect understanding, once possessed, become another ordinary thing? Would we begin to neglect it the way we neglect everything that once seemed impossible to obtain? But there might still be a small possibility that familiarity would not diminish it. Maybe becoming accustomed to someone is not always the death of intensity. What if familiarity isn't the corruption of connection? What if that's simply what safety feels like?

Maybe loneliness is not simply the absence of other people. Maybe it is the distance consciousness creates merely by existing. And if that distance can never entirely disappear, then the question is no longer how to escape loneliness.

Perhaps it is what, if anything, is worth reaching across it for.