On loneliness

Hello, old friend

Photo by Jorge Gardner on Unsplash

My husband leaves on Friday afternoon for a weekend away. Not long after he’s gone, loneliness arrives.

I sit next to my toddler at the table as he concentrates on chopping kinetic sand, and feel the ache in the depths of my being. Even with an upbeat pop song Spotify playlist that I put on to try and fill the space. I feel as if I am in a different place from my son. A transparent film between us and I, pressing the sand into plastic moulds to make castles, am only performing being a mother. Performing being present.

And it must always be there, this ache – it feels so familiar. I don’t notice it most of the time because of the constant doing-ness of life.

Now that it’s here, I’m afraid this feeling will grow. Will swallow me whole. This is familiar too – the terrible desperation of being afraid of myself. What can I do, now, in this moment?

I sit with it. Notice it. How does it feel in my body? What is this loneliness like?
Fear. Oh yes, there’s fear here.
And deep sadness.
And grief. The sense of losing something - something I needed so much. And being left alone. And the aloneness being terrifying.

Madonna’s song ‘Music’ comes on and I remember being a teenager, when that song came out. Longing so much to be noticed, to be accepted, to be loved.

God, how can I weather this? It’s hours until bedtime. Years ago, I drank to try to escape this feeling.

I used to describe it to people – to everyone who asked, exasperated: what’s wrong? - as being like an astronaut on a spacewalk.  When he turns away from the earth and looks out into the unfathomable depths of deep, dark space. That kind of aloneness.

Drinking didn’t really provide an escape – often it magnified the pain. I would go on Facebook hoping to see a green circle appear by someone’s name in messenger- someone I could talk to. Or I’d text, for the fifth time, that boy I sometimes slept with who was ignoring my messages. Who contacted me once in a blue moon and the rest of the time left me lying in agonising aloneness in the dark of night.

Now, these are no longer options. The only way to be with it is to believe that I can hold it. To believe that, intolerable though it feels, I am the container for what is here. It’s already here, and I am holding it.

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In Sheryl Paul’s comforting book The Wisdom of Anxiety she writes that loneliness ‘is part of the fabric of being human’, and that everyone feels this way. And I was so caught by this, when I read it a couple of years ago, because I didn’t know. I really didn’t know that other people felt lonely too. I thought my feelings of loneliness were evidence that I was a different, defective, a loser. Not popular, not likeable, not loved.

She writes:

‘Loneliness arrives like a hollow place in the tree of the body, the empty space where stomach and diaphragm meet. Loneliness is the space without breath. Loneliness is the time you cried alone in your bed, and nobody came to comfort you.’

‘There is only one antidote to loneliness: to befriend it.
When we make friends with loneliness – shedding the belief that we’re not supposed to feel it and shattering the fantasy that other people with their families and friends are immune to it – we welcome it through the front door. We greet loneliness as we would any other feeling state and become curious about its stories.’

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Tonight, as time wears on and I make dinner, give River a bath, and do puzzles with him on the living room floor, I feel a kind of numbness, inertia - a dissociative state that’s not unpleasant.

River jumps happily on the puzzle we’ve just completed, then pauses. He notices my unfocused eyes; my crumpled shape against the sofa.

‘You all-wight?’ he asks, concern in his little face.

Later, I cuddle up to him in his bed. The room is dark except for a string of fairy lights on the wall.

‘Story ‘bout an elephant, falls in the water,’ he whispers. ‘Do dat one.’

‘OK,’ I say, and tell him a story until he drifts off to sleep.

I lie there for a while, listening to his soft breathing.

By 9:30pm I am tired and ready to go to bed. A lingering sadness is here, like dust kicked up as I walk to the bathroom. An acceptance, too, I think. What is here, just is. This is how it is.

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