Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "loneliness"

It was a few weeks ago, late at night, and I was at the keys, working hard on my latest book, lost in the imaginary world I was in the process of creating. My apartment was dark save for the red lamps and a single, flickering candle. I had put on music as accompaniment, nothing with lyrics that would distract, just beautiful, solemn music that was playing under the collective heading of "You Look Lonely."

I had been at the bottle. It's an old writer's curse and not one I am going to complain about here, but yeah, I was probably in the bag. Sometimes it helps me access my thoughts. Sometimes it liberates me from my inhibitions. Sometimes it ignites feelings that, for me, are all too damned difficult to get at or perhaps gone altogether. But at some point I sat back, and, needing a break scrolled down in the comments section beneath the video. I don't normally do this. Comments on YouTube, while no where near as horrible as they were 10 - 15 years ago, are still usually vulgar and stupid enough to make me regret even glancing at them. But this night was different. Very different. Perhaps it was the sort of music the video played; perhaps it was merely the title, but the comments here were cut from different stone, true stone. And for what seemed like hours I read the private, pain-filled confessionals of complete strangers, people whose faces I couldn't see, whose voices I couldn't hear, who I will never meet in real life. And it shook me deeply. As I recently noted somewhere else, I see a lot of tragedy in my line of work. Robbery, rape, overdose, suicide, murder, all of it. It's gotten to the point where it's hard for me to experience a genuine emotional reaction to anything, hence the whiskey. But not that night.

Loneliness is a constant in my life. In bars, in cars, on the streets, in stores, everywhere. There is no way out. I am a single man.

I been alone for 35 years, nothing can fix that.

Is it weird to feel lonely even if you have a good social life? I just sometimes feel so lost, lonely, not aiming or seeking for new challenges in life. One day having a good laugh with friends and the day after or even the same evening it just hits you... "That" feeling. Thinking about doing great stuff in the future... but then never really starting to work towards it. I sometimes really question myself in every single way. Am I going to be succesfull one day? Am I going to make my parents proud of me one day? Am I going to stop stressing about everything one day? Am I going to be loved unconditionally one day...?

6'1" 185lbs Exercise regularly, stable job. Living on my own. No diseases. No kids. No criminal record. Still not good enough I guess and still single forever. Loneliness is the only thing that ever embraced me...

In the old days of the internet, I can remember "logging on" and having the most meaningful conversations with strangers about almost any topic imaginable. Now I feel like you can't post a picture of a sunset without somone hijacking or vandalizing the conversation to service their own anger or loathing or smugness or narcissism. All the roads lead to ugliness. But not this time. There was this weird democracy that comes with anonymity. Everyone became equal in their loneliness, and the confessions unfolded, page after page of bare-laid souls:

Yeah, I want to have someone to love. But every time I do I ask myself: "Am I good enough?" I give up. Sure I can love someone but for someone to love me is just a fake reality. For me, everything in life is just a straight line. When I get good and bad grades, when someone in my family dies, when someone insults me, I don't feel anything, just emptiness. I think I'm like this because I've been through a lot of bullying, I ignored them, closed myself from others and always put up a straight face. Every smile is fake, only lasts for a few seconds. So anyway that was my story. Thank you for reading.

i don't fear being alone I fear being lonely

I wish there were nice people. But hey, the world is not nice

I died years ago I am simply existing until im not, days and days go by, repeating over and over and i feel nothing im empty i can laugh and i can smile and joke and play but in the end im left with this emptiness that never goes away, sometimes i wish the night i died was really my death i wont take myself but this thing im living isnt a life its miserable and im secretly waiting for the end

Without you, there's nothing here for me.

And here i am in my bed crying because no one can fix me.

I can smile. I can laugh. I can be happy. But no one knows that truly it's an act. It's a manipulation or an easy way to deceive everyone. Let's be honest. You can buy anyone with a fake smile. And yes, im lonely...

I sat back in my chair in the red-lit darkness with the music brooding and the sound of the summer rain on the windows. I was drunk. Keenly aware that I was living a cliche as old as the typewriter -- probably as old as the quill. There was something so Film Noir about the crimson light, the sad soul-tugging music, the endless outpouring of anonymous pain. About the way the ice clinked and rattled in my glass when I sipped the cold liquid fire that makes me more human. About the way my own thoughts turned inward.

Thought i was getting better but today all the memories just hit me like a ton of bricks, i miss her voice and laugh and cute smile so much....she was my whole world and ill never forget you

I don't feel anything anymore and Idc...

i hate myself, i hate the decisions i made. i hate my life, im so depressed.

I've been in self isolation for five years. Hardly living , clinging on to every day, every ounce of hope just so I won't commit the Act . Worst is, I'm living with my fam who don't understand me at all. No matter how much I've cried Infront of them. I have no control in life, I can't even finish myself. When will this end!

I simply give up. I've been alone all my life, loneliness is now part of me. Three years of psychotherapy got me nowhere and now I'm back on antidepressants. I will accept the fact that I am not made for this world

The only thing missing was a cigarette so its smoke could curl in the neon light. It was all so perfectly atmospheric, so poetically sad. I was even in a cotton undershirt.

Probably ending it all soon, thank you for the final few fleeting moments of clarity this music gave me.

I pass by her house…it’s like we never met before. It feels like I’m the only one who carries the memories. Sometimes I see her car pass by and wonder if she feels the same.

Every night, before I close my eyes I wish, I beg even don't wake up again, I want quit this, I'm not enough

I feel nothing anymore. There's absolutely nothing I want to do, only things I have to do. Nothing brings me joy....

dark hours, cacophony of multicolor lights, alcohol and tobacco smell, wrong feelings, contradictory, glimmer of hope, suffocated in filth...but it s kind of...ok this way....the cold...the only constant in your life....get used to it

I was moved. Profoundly moved. One could argue all pity is self-pity, a projection of one's fears, or a recognition of one's own hurts, but I don't buy it. Not all the way. Statements like that are never more than half-truths, and those who utter them always have their own hidden motives for leaving out the other half. In any event what I felt was a need to engage, to join the confession. Writing is a solitary pursuit, after all, and the dividing line between solitude and loneliness is often indistinguishable.

"Show me your relationship to pain," I wrote, quoting one of my favorite authors. "And I will show you who you are." And then I added my own spin, which when you are already spinning is not difficult to do: "Show me your relationship to loneliness and I will show you who you do not wish to be."

Eventually a reply came. Someone quite rightly asking for a clarification. "I feel like this is a quote that I kind of understand on the surface, but there’s a deeper meaning I don’t get. Could you go into more detail?"

I was embarrassed at having been so deliberately vague and mystical, so after a lot of thinking I answered, with apologies:

"Our ability to withstand pain is accepted as a measure of our strength. But the degree to which we can endure loneliness is in some ways a measure of our weakness...we habituate ourselves to a state we despise and would do almost anything to escape from. We begin to pride ourselves outwardly, in a perverse way, that we are 'strong enough' to walk alone, meanwhile secretly longing to walk hand in hand with someone else. In other words, the more we can stand up to loneliness the more we hate it, and the greater our desire to escape it becomes."

Re-reading this now, on another night where the lamps are casting their glow, I see that I had spoken truly, which is hardly always the case when talking with strangers under the influence of the True. Anyone who reads my blogs - or my fiction, for that matter -- knows I have an abiding romance with pain, and this too, is a cliche. The half-starving writer, whose melting glass of ice cubes and whiskey sits atop a heap of unpaid bills and parking tickets and rejection slips, whose trophy cup for Best Novel of 20XX is full of cigarette butts, who gets more respect from strangers who have read his work than friends who never will, is almost a caricature, and when you throw in the fact that all writers are liars who speak more truly with their lies, as Hemingway sort-of said, than other people speak with their truths, I could perhaps be accused of telling a creative fib here: but I am not. These strangers bared their souls and in my own way, more pompously perhaps, but nevertheless truly, I bared mine. I was caught up in a peculiar sort of moment, when a person who has difficulty feeling things, or at any rate often has difficulty feeling what others would deem the right things, forgot the double ring of calluses over his emotions.

The next day I did a lot of thinking about loneliness, and whether the age we live in has led to an epidemic or merely exposed its existence. A lot gets blamed on the internet, in many cases justly, but if we are honest with ourselves, we often heap upon it the same guilt which fell on television in the 70s - 80s and video games since the late 90s, only a smallish part of which was rooted in verifiable fact. Technology has become a kind of whipping boy for our societal ills, and loneliness, unlike, say, mass shootings, is not a newish phenomenon. But I confess that I do believe that this condition, initially soothed for so many by the creation of chatrooms, instant messaging and the like 25-plus years ago, has now become horribly exacerbated. Instead of facilitating human contact, it has allowed humans to live without for years at a time. An entire generation has grown up considering text messaging to be a more normal form of communication than talking over the phone, and "ghosting" as the preferred means of dismissing someone from your life rather than a painful but cathartic confrontation in person. People sitting opposite one another at restaurants, even people outside in the sunshine, like as not have their faces buried in their mobile devices, isolating themselves even when surrounded by others. Humans are gregarious animals and suffer according psychological damage when isolated from other humans. Alerts on a phone are a poor substitute for intimacy, and it is starting to show.

I know I have a reactionary, even a hypocritical attitude toward a lot of technology. I use it and I don't really want to live without it and yet I despise it all the same. Even now, sitting here alone in the dark listening to a sad playlist ("They Moved On Too Fast"), I am rejecting human society in favor of connecting with a scattering of people I'll never meet. And perhaps that why it hit me so hard, that outpouring of loneliness, of grief: because I see so much of it in myself. There is something curiously and horribly seductive about it, something romantic, and that brings me back to the beginning of this note, to the atmosphere that loneliness brings with it. Loneliness is a feeling, and under certain circumstances we've all experienced can even become a condition; but it is not meant to be a lifestyle. It should never be normalized or accepted, as so many people in the comments section accepted it, as something all-encompassing and inescapable. My own, pre-internet generation saw it as a shameful condition never to be admitted, but this in retrospect was hardly the high ground, moral or otherwise, and my words to the stranger on the subject are the ones I truly hold with: to measure ourselves by our ability to endure loneliness, or to find some virtue in it where none exists, is a fool's errand. And with that in mind, I am pushing away from the keyboard and leaving my apartment to mingle with my fellow humans. I sincerely hope you do the same. For the solitude there is always time.