Hi!
Hello! I’ve not really read anything of interest in the past few weeks. I’m very sorry. My brain is mush, due to the election and also the Euros. Whenever I have free time I spend it playing Dead Cells or doing New Yorker crosswords - the duality of man, and all that.
I’m still able to write though, which is reassuring, so free subscribers can have some little thoughts, and paying subscribers can have those too, and then some longer thoughts behind the paywall. Seems fair to me.
434 more words on loneliness (but not art)
You know I have to be honest here and say that I really was in two minds about writing and sending out last week’s essay. I’m very used to baring my soul online but for some reason, admitting to feeling lonely quite a lot of the time just felt mortifying.
I knew I was being irrational, but I kept worrying that people would read it and make fun of me, like middle school never ended. Instead, a lot of people got in touch - some publicly, most of them privately - to say that the essay had resonated with them in one way or another.
Art was not always everyone’s favoured way of dealing with aching loneliness but everyone had their version of it - gigs, the opera, the theatre, whatever else. What we all had in common is that sometimes we felt very alone in the world.
I am now very happy I decided to publish the essay, because I think it’s something we ought to be more open about. Some people got in touch offering their time and friendship and it was nice of them but I worry they misunderstood my point, on several levels.
Firstly, I already have some friends, whom I love very much. Seeing them always makes me happy, but that doesn’t mean it always fills the void stubbornly squatting inside of me. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I don’t believe that loneliness is something that we can easily get rid of, or something we should aim to get rid of altogether. It’s a normal part of the human experience!
I worry sometimes that people think their lives are in some way a failure if they spend a fair bit of time feeling quite alone, when a worse thing to do, in my opinion, would be to spend said life trying your hardest to run away from any possible loneliness.
We can’t spend all our time feeling entirely fulfilled and that is fine. It is probably even more than fine, actually, as yearning to fill that gap is what drove me to art, and will end up driving many people to many things. I have many hobbies and all of them make my life feel richer, and I never would have sought them out if I’d never felt that I had too much time and energy on my hands.
In conclusion: feeling lonely isn’t great but it isn’t inherently bad either! It’s also not shameful, unless we decide that it is. Clearly, we all go through some lonely stretches once in a while. That is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.
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