For as long as I can remember, I’ve been kind of a loner. A lone wolf. A nomad, if you will. I recognize how cheesy that sounds, but it is alone that I hear my thoughts most clearly. It is when I’m alone that I feel the most myself.
Or so I’ve always thought.
I’ve never really had a problem with doing things alone. A friend flakes on plans to go to the farmer’s market? It’s the perfect excuse to plug in earphones and romanticize my life as I browse through sellers’ booths. My roommate can no longer have dinner with me tomorrow night? That’s OK, I’ll just order take-out from my favorite restaurant and put on a movie — we can reschedule for next week. And if she cancels next week too, it’s no problem. I’ll just come up with something else to do — alone.
A few months ago, these plans would have sounded like the habits of an extremely mindful and resourceful person who values her time above anything else. Now, though, my tendency to spend so much time alone just sounds sad. My sophomore year of college is over and I’m left to reflect on the year of my life that has just passed. I wonder when and where this shift in mindset happened.
***
Perhaps it dates back to the fall of my sophomore year. At this point in my life, I still loved doing things alone. I would schedule time to study with friends just to have an excuse to take myself to a bookstore a few hours later as if I were rewarding myself. My idea of the perfect way to unwind after a long day of studying and socializing was to spend at least two hours in my own company. At this point in time, life was good. I was spending a lot of time alone, but I wasn’t necessarily lonely.
A few weeks into the year, I was walking back to my apartment with a friend who lives in the same apartment complex as me. We were discussing just how different the first few weeks of sophomore year felt in comparison to freshman year.
“I can’t help but feel like something about this year is off, you know?” he pondered.
“I kind of get that, a lot of things are different. But what do you mean, exactly?” I wondered.
We had moved out of our first-year dorms and lived off-campus now, presenting us with the forever infamous “sophomore slump.” We were no longer constantly surrounded by friends and classmates, separated by only the cinder-block walls of the dorms; we were all facing a lot more alone time. While I understood there had been an element of change in our lives, I didn’t entirely understand what he was trying to tell me.
“I just feel like I’m always alone now,” he said. “I don’t take classes with anyone I know anymore. I just commute from my apartment to North Campus and back all by myself. And once I’m back on Central Campus, it seems like everyone’s busy with their own stuff and doesn’t have time to just hang out like we used to last year. I guess I’m just curious as to how you do it?”
“What?” I nervously replied.
“How do you spend so much time alone? And how do you even enjoy it?” he clarified.
To his question, I began spewing a litany of thoughtful pieces of advice that I didn’t even know I was capable of offering. “You need to learn how to be alone,” I explained. “Occupy your time with things that make you forget time is passing and that you genuinely enjoy.” But even as I gave him this advice, it felt vague and unconvincing. For the first time in my life, I questioned whether I actually enjoyed my time alone or if I’d been pretending all along. Had I been lying to myself for months, years even?
After the conversation with my friend, I opened the door to my apartment, and as I shut it behind me, I kept wondering about the reality of my loneliness. As I got ready for bed, I began to overthink the amount of time I was spending alone. I questioned if I truly enjoyed my time alone, or if I indulged in these behaviors to keep myself guarded against feeling lonely. Were my solo dates and cravings for time with myself a healthy habit or a coping mechanism? Did I lean on self-isolation to prevent loneliness in the event that I became physically alone?
As if on command, I began to isolate myself from my social circle. Maybe I needed time alone, or perhaps I was trying to prove something, who knows? But all of a sudden, I became someone who apparently didn’t like to go out or spend much time with others and just wanted to engage in wholesome little activities all by my lonesome. Don’t get me wrong, I already enjoyed doing things by myself. But I also loved to engage in social contact. It was all in the balance until this conversation with my friend. If my friend saw me as someone who was alone all the time, did everyone else around me think the same? Was it my destiny to play into this role? As a result, I initiated a gruesome cycle of staying in when all of my friends went out because I would rather “unwind” alone than spend yet another night at one of the usual college bars we always frequented.
Now, I’m not saying that staying in from time to time with a good book and a warmly lit candle isn’t a fun and reasonable way to spend one’s time. I would argue that it’s my favorite hobby. But just like everything else in life, once you make a hobby too much of a routine, it becomes mundane. As I tried to prove a point, to myself more than anyone, that you can be just as fulfilled spending time alone, I became increasingly isolated. While this was intentional, for the first time in my life, instead of just feeling alone I was lonely. I craved human connection more than ever and latched on to the sporadic bouts of it that I got.
I had turned spending time alone into an unhealthy coping mechanism. It had become a way for me to make peace with the image I thought I was supposed to be conveying to others instead of a habit I could turn to whenever I needed to unwind. By the end of the fall term of my sophomore year, I was lonely.
This past semester was ultimately my busiest semester to date. With 17 credits and four time-consuming extracurriculars on my plate, I barely had time to breathe, let alone feel my feelings. And even then, I caught myself, despite my past of voluntary solitary confinement, putting my responsibilities aside when presented with an opportunity to socialize. However, the times I actually did decide to go out and spend time with others, it felt impossible for me to interact with those around me. My social anxiety was at an all-time high and, having spent so much time alone the semester prior, I had forgotten how to spend time in company that wasn’t my own.
As I boarded my flight back to Michigan this past January, I found myself with ample time to reflect on the previous semester and what the upcoming term might have in store for me. I didn’t yet recognize the feeling of loneliness that loomed over me. Upon reflection, I believed that this upcoming semester would be the best yet, but I wasn’t planning on breaking any of the habits I had cultivated the semester before. I was, to put it simply, in denial about the poor habits of self-isolation I’d cultivated. And even if I began to break these patterns eventually, I did so unconsciously as a result of how uncomfortable my self-inflicted solitude was making me feel.
I now realize that I was trying to overcompensate for my loneliness by hitting an extreme. While I had subjected myself to lots of time alone in the fall to prove how comfortable I was spending time alone, I now forced myself to be around people all the time. I went from one end of the spectrum to the other and forgot how important balance is in the process.
***
Much reflection on my own loneliness begged the question, is being alone the same thing as being lonely? Is one an experience and the other a feeling? Do they exist simultaneously or separately?
In an attempt to make sense of my own loneliness and what the difference between being alone and feeling lonely is like for others, I sought out a variety of sources that felt comfortable talking to me about their own experiences.
University of Michigan Social Work Student Elena Tsantis defined the difference between being alone and feeling lonely, but also clarified that the two experiences can coexist.
“Being alone is a physical experience where I’m quite literally alone and no one that I know is around me,” she said. “When I’m lonely, I feel like I can experience (it) as a feeling, but I can’t literally be lonely. Sometimes I experience loneliness whether I’m physically alone or if I’m not physically alone. I can be around people, but I can still feel lonely if they don’t really get me.”
Tsantis’ distinction between being alone and feeling lonely felt very poetic. While one can be described as a physical experience, the other is more of a sensation. There’s a certain type of warped beauty in knowing that aloneness and loneliness can complement each other, as well as contradict one another.
Bingqing Han, recent Environment and Sustainability school graduate, explained this difference further.
“I’m pretty comfortable being alone, so I don’t have the need to connect and talk to other people. (This leads me) to really feel lonely,” she said.
Han’s definition left me feeling simultaneously seen and interested. She concisely phrased the experience of enjoying one’s time alone so much that human connection doesn’t feel like a primordial need, but such an experience can also lead to us craving that feeling even more as a direct result of self-inflicted isolation.
LSA junior Jacquelyn Wrubel also spoke to how being lonely and being alone are two distinct parts of the human experience.
“Being alone is … quite literally not being with anyone, whereas if you feel lonely, you can be surrounded by people and have friends who do support and love you, but you can still feel lonely (as a result of) not being understood … or even just not getting what you want out of the relationships you’re in,” she said.
Wrubel’s definition of the aforementioned difference is richly simple. While being alone feels like the tangibly lived experience of not being in close proximity to others, feeling lonely is essentially the opposite. It’s feeling alone in a sea of people because you don’t feel validated to the fullest extent. It’s having to translate your soul in order to feel seen.
***
As I sought out interviews for this piece, I insisted that my questions came from a place of curiosity and the drive to attribute fact to reason. I wanted to evaluate people’s answers and arrive at a universal definition of what it means to be alone versus what it means to feel lonely. However, under the surface of my quest for knowledge lay a quest to feel validated, to feel seen.
In this quest to solve my own loneliness, I intentionally spoke with a variety of people. I mistakenly believed that the cure for my loneliness existed within others, leading me to overanalyze every interaction I had and place an unfair amount of weight on the shoulders of those close to me. I expected those around me to notice my loneliness, an unfair expectation to place in the hands of those who can only be there for you if you let them in. I wanted people to see me without explaining what it was that I wanted them to see.
After a lot of thought and energy expended on this pursuit, I began to come to terms with the fact that the loneliness I was feeling wasn’t necessarily my fault, and it also wasn’t the fault of anyone around me. While it was mainly situational, and it definitely wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last, time I was experiencing it, and it was my responsibility to learn how to manage it.
At the end of each interview, I asked each of the individuals to share if they felt like they were ever going to be able to find a solution for their loneliness. There was a general consensus that loneliness, like any other emotion, is likely to ebb and flow throughout life. There was, however, one participant who phrased their answer in an especially thought-provoking way.
Near the end of her interview, Wrubel said, “Personally, do I think (the feeling of loneliness) will ever completely go away? No, because then I feel like I would be a perfect human being. I would have figured myself entirely out, and what’s the fun in stopping to discover yourself?”
After ending my call with Wrubel, I couldn’t stop thinking about what she had said. Yes, I was tired, and I’m still tired, of trying to figure out a singular reason for my loneliness and a perfect way to combat it. But I was also left thinking, would I rather not have any feelings about the topic at all? Would I rather go through life in a static state of being, instead of experiencing a pool of thoughts and feelings and later living to tell the tale?
To put it simply, no. I like feeling loudly and living boldly, even if this means having to experience a variety of emotions to their most intense capacity. And I want to continue doing that for the rest of my life. Maybe my loneliness will extend for a few more months, perhaps even years. Maybe it will suddenly disappear one day just to come back the next. But, I refuse to let loneliness stop me from living. Even more so, I refuse to let it stop me from discovering myself.
Statement Correspondent Graciela Batlle Cestero can be reached at gbatllec@umich.edu.
The post To feel lonely is to live boldly appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply