Your loneliness is your strength

Being with ourselves and others in scary times

Photo by Simone Eufemi on Unsplash

By Tess GC

I went through a really big breakup recently. I’m back living at my parents’ house, and my plans for the future – to live in community with other people, sustaining ourselves, and being politically active in the community – are suddenly interrupted. Before, things felt safer and surer amid a scary present and future, and now they feel really uncertain again.

With the news of last weekend that Joe Biden is dropping out of the presidential race, we’re all in for a wild ride to November, hoping that the likely new candidate, Kamala Harris, can beat Trump. That’s not to say that Kamala Harris is some saint of the people who will suddenly enact more humane policies than we have right now. But I think a lot of us are aware that fascism and the right wing are on a dramatic increase in this country just when we need the opposite, and to be able to fight back, we need more time than we have if Trump wins; more time to develop infrastructure in our communities, and networks of organizing, resistance, and care. And here I find myself, just when I am feeling the pressure and need for those things, without the ability to build right now, my life thrown into uncertainty and disarray.

As I’ve been talking to my parents and my friends, and trying to sort out how the hell I feel, what I’m going to do now, and where I’m going to go, I’ve been struck by the juxtaposition between two things on my mind:

1. That I’m going to be okay. That the stories of my family and friends going through these kinds of life-altering experiences are many, and usually just as devastating, and therefore that so many of us, maybe even most of us have and will go through times where we’re left wondering how we go on;

2. The fear that I’m not going to be okay because I’m now floating out here, without the deep community I want to have, therefore unable to engage in the politics and organizing I want to engage in, and without resources for the future I want to have. What’s clear to me in both of these feelings is a question of aloneness: how it scares us, how it’s fundamental to our existence, how it’s harming us, and how trying to understand it can make it one of our greatest allies as we fight, as we rest, and as we live into the present and future.

Some of the scariest things that a lot of us feel right now are aloneness and loneliness, or the fear of those things creeping up on us. And that goes from the recently broken up to the partnered, from those with money to those without, and everyone in-between. But aloneness and loneliness aren’t the same thing. A reality of being alive, which we really don’t like to think about until we’re forced to, is that aloneness is part of existing. The people we meet and love and spend our lives with are never fixed and never certain, might go away and leave us. Everything we do will eventually end, every person we hold close will eventually not be with us, whether that end is in death or for some other reason. And this is guaranteed. The experience that we each are having in our own bodies and minds can never be fully with anyone else, and for that reason, aloneness is part of what we experience all the time, and it is just a truth.

Photo by Marc Zimmer on Unsplash

My therapist sent me some resources that I was going through recently, and one of them was about this very topic. The idea was that loneliness is what we feel when we allow our aloneness to make us feel separate from the life and existence that is happening around us. In contrast, this person suggested that wholeness, oneness, being in fact a part of everything around you, is how we don’t allow aloneness to scare us, but let it work its truth on us like magic — instead of despair and loneliness, we are able to feel our fear for ourselves lessen, and feel the reality that aloneness is not at-odds with being part of existence. 

I’m not sharing a link to that resource, because to be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about all of their thinking. Some of it felt a little too “the world is fine if you just mentally transcend it.” Spirituality isn’t offering much if it isn’t speaking to people being bombed and starved and priced out of their homes. But this thinking about aloneness did prompt my own in considering the types of aloneness we feel that connect or disconnect us from our lives. 

See, at the same time as there is this existential reality of facing our aloneness, we’re dealing with structurally alone-loneliness in many ways in the United States. In a recent article, my friend and writer Marianne Agnes said of this aloneness:

“Nor, by this point, do we imagine that this isolation is accidental or apolitical – in the visage of state oppression we see the shepherds doing evil, scattering us intentionally, keeping us from building stronger communities and a robust sense of togetherness by overworking and exploiting us in our 9-5 jobs, by creating transit infrastructures that isolate both the car commuters and the over-policed residents of the neighborhoods in the shadow of the highway overpasses alike. We are led astray and scattered by force-fed ‘culture war’ narratives, when in reality it is a class war waged upon us.”

There’s a real existential and spiritual demand that we deal with the reality, and even the goodness of being alone. And there’s also a social, political, human, and spiritual need to say “enough!” to our created aloneness and loneliness, our feelings that our struggles are ours alone to bear, that living isolated lives without communal goodness and richness is okay and normal.

Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash

As I sit here examining my deep re-acquaintance with the fundamental aloneness of myself — that myself is the only person I’ll always have for sure — I’m also deeply sad and craving community, and a cure for the loneliness of this society. It is a deep sickness that we live with. Our circumstances in this time and place are like salt in an open wound, an unnecessary burden for us to bear while we struggle to accept the realities of being human, which is difficult enough even when surrounded by rich and wise community. The keys to this community are already living in us, though. Recognizing how fundamental and shared an experience aloneness is, across every single one of us, we have the spirit of solidarity living within ourselves, and therefore ready to spread into our communities. Feeling loneliness, the pain of aloneness, allows us to ask deeper questions, look into ourselves, and then look out at those around us.

All this is to say, I think it is essential that as we journey together in troubled times, we show each other all the love and care and support we can, all the solidarity that our tired hearts and fragile backbones can muster — God knows I don’t know where I’d be right now without those things. But at the same time, each of us has to undertake the difficult journey of learning to be with ourselves: knowing ourselves, loving these complex creatures that we are; and finding, cultivating, and nurturing the place that exists inside each of us that is present, that refuses to abandon ourselves, even when we feel alone, abandoned, lost, or forsaken by the world. It’s in finding that in ourselves that aloneness isn’t a black hole of loss and loneliness, but a place from which we can brave the world as it is, pick ourselves back up when the things we are afraid of may come to pass, and in which we see others in ourselves, the truest definition of solidarity and togetherness that there is. When we can feel our own aliveness and presence in ourselves, we’re not fundamentally broken from what we may experience, but able to still feel hope, even when there are cracks and breaks in what we so carefully try to build for ourselves.

Photo by John Silliman on Unsplash

As I write this, I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom, in a small town where I never had an easy time making friends and fitting in. In this room I have experienced so much heartbreak and pessimism and loneliness, just like I feel right now. But I have also known magic and hope for the future here, and found that there is a deep need inside of me, after, and even as I grieve what is, and doubt that I can keep going, to choose to turn toward love, in the end. I think that spark is the place inside of me that means I am never really alone. It knows that life and its pain are still gifts, even when we’re left with ourselves to brave them.

We all have that spark, and I hope that each of us can work on tending to it, even when we don’t think it’s there: as our circumstances change, as life is uncertain, as we’re afraid for the future. And I hope that we can trust in that spark to always reveal to us our interconnection to everyone and everything around us, in a world that is so broken and so deeply needs us to feel that, and to act on it. Your loneliness means you are alive and capable of love and connection. Thank god! So work on loving the spirit in yourself, making peace with your aloneness, and having you, even though you can’t control the future, so that we can hold together and respond to the forces in this world that threaten the things we hold close.