Living Alone: An Anti-Primer

Let’s clarify this from the outset: I like being alone, but I dislike living alone. It’s an ideal situation for me when I can close myself up in a room and do my work, but when I open the door again I want people there to hang out with, to eat with, to watch TV and movies with, to go shopping with, to go on excursions with. After once living in a household of seven, my wife and my five kids and me, the long periods of isolation are excruciatingly difficult. I thought perhaps I could get used to it, but so far I have not been able to feel serenity about the situation – except for brief intervals when I manage to “look on the bright side” so to speak, and contemplate the positive aspects of my existence. It is almost a form of self-hypnosis that I engage in. And I know that I am not the only one to feel this. Loneliness, especially with older people living alone, is a national epidemic, it seems.

For me, however, this gut-wrenching sensation of loneliness is not directly related to age. I have always hated living alone. Traveling alone, even for long periods of time, is different, because the constantly changing environments and transient companions are distracting. I’m talking about prolonged sessions of being alone in one location. I rented my first apartment in the University District of Seattle, a scant couple of miles from the home of my parents and my eight brothers and sisters, just so I could get away from everybody, become independent, and make my own decisions. It was a fiasco. I was totally unprepared for a solitary lifestyle, and it didn’t last long. Other solo apartment adventures were scant improvements. In another apartment in the University District, when I was older, I had a string of girlfriends coming and going, but there were still times when it was only me and that was one of the things that ultimately drove me out on the road. When I rented an apartment in Los Angeles it was with the motivation of breaking into screenplay writing, yet still there were times when the solitude was overwhelming. I remember once when I was feeling really down I looked out the window and thought I saw the moon. “At least,” thought I, “the moon is rising; eternal beauties continue.” As I continued to watch it, though, it seemed to never move. Finally I went outside to check and discovered that I had been staring at a street lamp.

I attempted to mitigate my loneliness by renting houses or duplexes with friends. This was better, although it seemed that me and my roommates could rarely decide who should do the dishes. But roommates come and go. Once I rented a two-bedroom duplex with my best friend, and then he took off for Europe and left me on my own. My feelings in this situation were epitomized when Seattle was hit with a brutally cold winter. Outside, snow was deep on the ground, and inside, I couldn’t afford to keep the whole place heated so I had to spend all my time in my bedroom where I had a space heater.

As I thought back, these examples reminded me that what I am experiencing now is not an anomaly. This is how I always react to loneliness. To clarify, hitchhiking alone across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East or hiking alone in the Himalayan Mountains, all of which I have done, do not provoke the same gut-wrenching negative emotions. Those were glorious adventures, and I was fully aware that I might not have ever had them if I had waited around for someone willing to go with me. No doubt there are times when one needs to step out on one’s own. What I feel now alone in my apartment after my last child has grown and gone away is different.

Often when I write essays like this I conclude with a lesson. I give my thoughts a twist so that they come out positive in the end. This time I’m not so sure I can do that. I suppose all I can suggest, if you are in a similar situation, is to hang in there. I have been rereading James Branch Cabell’s masterpiece, the fantasy novel Jurgen. When the hero meets people who have difficulties or defects that cannot be helped, he says, “God speed to you, for many others are in your plight.” This is the only solace he can offer, and it doesn’t really cure the difficulty at all. That’s all I can say now too. In our modern era loneliness is epidemic. Would that there were a vaccine for it.