I Feel So Lonely

Everyone talks about how important solitude is. How beautiful it can be to take some time for yourself away from everyone else.

But it’s hard to regard solitude as important when it’s not exactly our choice. When we did not ask for it. When we wish to have more company. 

Throughout our lives, we meet a lot of people. We get to have friends, neighbors, lovers. We get to have lives that aren’t just about us. That inherently include other people.

Most of the times this is the case with everyone. The fact that your life isn’t only about you. That it is basically a story with so many characters in it and hopefully, with you the main character until the end. But like any other story, characters are not quite a stable element.

Some characters stay, some leave, and some just change. Just like we do.

There will be times when you find yourself completely alone.

Maybe your friends got married, traveled to some other country, or just got busy with their lives and now they don’t talk to you anymore.

Maybe you have realized lately that you are not as important in other people’s lives as you thought you were.

Maybe the people you called friends turned out to be way less than this.

Maybe you have just realized that you have always felt lonely. You have just never paid attention to the reality.

Your phone doesn’t ring. Social media is basically the only way you get in touch with others. The only way to show them that you’re alive. You believe that if you deactivated your online accounts no one would notice your absence.

You are alone, but more importantly, you are lonely. It’s not necessarily about the absence of people around you, it’s mostly just about the absence of genuine care and unconditional love.

It’s mostly about those nights where you long to talk to someone so much but there is no one to listen to what you have to say.

It’s mostly about the days when you are too sad to get up in the morning but you have to push yourself through. You have to because no one is going to come and help you.

You are lonely and you wish a friend would call and ask you out for coffee. 

But nothing happens except for your loneliness. It seems to expand more with time. It seems like you’re watching your social life narrow more with time. You’re watching your heart as it gets ensheathed with darkness.

Loneliness is not that bad. As a matter of fact, we crave loneliness from time to time. We want to isolate ourselves from the world, from the effects others have on us, from the changes that happen to us so fast we can’t detect them.

But loneliness can be a dull prison that makes you constantly look for an escape. In fact, as long as you’re looking for an escape, you’re kind of in control. Because there is a moment when loneliness could convince you that this is what you’re meant for.

And how I pray you never reach that point, because if you do, you could give up.

You could lose.

You have to understand that on some days, you can’t fight your loneliness. You will be stuck with it and hence, you will have to make as much use of it as possible.

You will have to read, learn something new, go for lunch all by yourself, take yourself for coffee. You will have to realize that you are sometimes the best company you could wish for.

You have to understand that on some days, you will allow yourself to be as vulnerable as you can get and you will call for help. You will ask people to come and save you.

You will tell someone that you’re not okay and you wish they could be with you at this moment — and I hope they will respond by arriving at your door. I hope they will listen to your cry for help.

But on some days, you can be the friend you wish you had when you were alone. You can be the one who offers others a hand. Who gives unconditional love and calls a friend for some casual meeting just to catch up.

You can be the one who saves others from their loneliness because you’ll discover that this way, you’re saving yourself, too.