What a title. It sounds like wallowing in self pity. But you have to assume that there are different kinds of loneliness, just as there are different kinds of love. Love of mother, love of ideas, love of country, or love of a lover. Loneliness also comes in many forms. When your lover has gone, that’s one type. when your ideas aren’t accepted, another. Friendless.
I’m not gregarious, the result of a lifetime of training. The only child of a pair of off beat parents, I learned early to use my environment as the other. This explains how I am as content in a forest as I am in the company of most people, or as I used to tell students, one can feel loneliness walking down a New York City street among millions of people yet feel completely at ease, alone, in the woods.
Now and during most of my life I have had only a handful of friends. Do I miss the company of groups? No. Crowds of any sort have some of the same effect as wearing heavy clothing. And, if I am in the vicinity of a bandwagon mentality, I run from it. Yet, in all this need for social independence lies a yearning, rarely satisfied, a critical element that is basic for any human being. That is sharing. No easy task for a character such as myself. Obsessive, compulsive, at times arrogant, unresponsive to most social trends, and one whose activities define esoteric in the public mind. Oddball, giving little credence to public taste. In a word, neurotic.
You might think, how lonely this person must be. But as I said earlier, my environment becomes the other. Can a person exist is such a state, without the ease and comfort and convenience and safety of society? Not entirely, of course. It is natural that people judge the state of others from their own perspective. If going to clubs or parties or theme parks or community meetings or sports bars or simply getting together with a group of friends each Friday night is someone’s way of life, it becomes not only acceptable but normal. Anyone alien to such behavior is assumed to be lonely, and in many cases he is shunned. Now, I don’t feel shunned because I’m so far removed from the comfortable experience of most group activities that I’m not considered.
How can one such as myself have any friends at all? Well, opposed to the dark litany of personal characteristics above, my sense of humor, a willingness to help someone in need, a tolerance for quirky behavior, and a moderately educated conversational tone command acceptance in everyday interaction.
What makes my life difficult is that I see friendship as substantive, a basis for allowing our lives to be enriched through meaningful dialogue and thought. A platform on which to launch our passions. How passionate are most people about their lives? Efforts toward fundamental happiness necessarily take precedent over the sacrifice needed to pursue passions. The struggle to survive, to have a home not headed toward foreclosure, to create a family that is not dysfunctional, to maintain a job that is secure, these depress the soul’s longing for a creative moment.
But friendship can nurture the human need to expand life beyond survival, even beyond the elements seen as the keys to happiness, which are in most cases short-lived or illusional. External objects do not satisfy the need for self-fulfillment, nor does the removal of adverse conditions that threaten social stability. Nor even the ephemeral ecstasy of a sexual encounter. Passion, on the other hand, demands more than objects or praise or physical satisfaction. And friendship, if allowed to grow beyond the need for a companion, mutually affirms our desperation to pursue a life encompassing the passion that will make us fully human. It is then we realize that loneliness is not the physical absence of people but the saddening notion that our better thoughts, our dreams, bear no more consequence than the next paycheck.
