Sitting with yourself
“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
These posts stay free because I don’t believe good writing should live behind a velvet rope.
I was having a chat with a friend on feeling lonely even after having all night conversations with “the one”. And it reminded me how much we mistake our loneliness for something other people bring in our lives.
Funnily enough, lonely people in relationships are more common than lonely people who really are alone. A 2019 study out of the University of Michigan found that married individuals who reported low relationship quality scored higher on loneliness measures than single adults who maintained intentional friendships and solitary practices. The intervention that helps isn’t more people. It’s simply different engagement.
The structure of the Hollywood fantasy we all grew up with goes like this: there is a missing piece. Someone else holds it. When they arrive, and they will arrive, because being the center of the universe, we are owed arrival, then the hollow in the chest fills. The noise in the head quiets. And you guessed it, we live happily ever after! This is the pattern we are handed, fairy tale by fairy tale, romantic comedy by romantic comedy, until the blueprint is so familiar we mistake it for destiny.
But the truth is, you cannot build a self on another person’s presence. The foundation of your life, of your happiness can’t be someone else’s willingness to participate. And so we become lonely and we think we are depressed because someone wouldn’t give us their missing piece to fill in our gaps.
I’ve been young once and tried to reach for a person like for a wall in a dark room, needing something solid. And for a while the wall holds. Then the wall develops its own inner life, habits, wants and needs, its own snappy fatigue, its own need to sometimes be a window instead. In a different house. Maybe in a different city, far away from you. And then you find yourself standing in the dark again. More frightened than before because now you’ve proven the thing you feared: you can’t hold yourself up alone, plus no one wants you enough to stay with you in the dark.
That’s our life’s fears and nightmares when it comes to relationships and being with ourselves.
Except that’s not what it proves. What it proves is only that you’d never practiced making a wall. If you’ve done it, you knew that one person can build a wall on their own, then another, then put light fixtures on it in all the right places and sit a roof on those walls to make themselves a cozy space in which they can feel safe and warm.
Capitalism sold us the missing-piece story because a person who is already full is a bad consumer. Loneliness, in the economic analysis, is productive, it keeps you purchasing toward completion. A new body in your bed. A new notification on your phone.
The attention economy is built on the magical frequency of unresolved fears and hungers. YOUR fears and hungers. Swiping through faces is not an accident - the commodification of connection, selling you the problem and the cure in the same app, charging you monthly for the privilege of feeling almost-but-not-quite-found, it’s a designed system.
Your loneliness is profitable and your incompleteness is their subscription service to your accounts.
Patriarchy adds its own brick to this. Women are trained with ferocity to locate their meaning outside themselves, in being chosen, in being witnessed by the right set of eyes. Be pretty, stand still, don’t run, don’t play, you’ll hurt yourself, people will laugh at your less elegant fall and at the scrapes on your knees. Don’t talk, people will think you’re stupid. Have no opinions, women just need to fill the space with beauty. The whole machine runs better when half the population is structurally dependent on validation they cannot self-generate. This infrastructure our society built around us is a lie.
The radical move, when you realize you’re being neatly packed into an empty seed waiting to be filled with life, is to become interested in your own life. Suddenly turning toward it with the same hunger you’ve been turning toward other people. Loving yourself first before you pour onto others. Seeing yourself as what you really were: the one who always sat there for yourself, just as an unfed mind who grew loneliness inside.
There is a study from 2014 that sounds weird but reflects so well our inability to be alone. Researchers at the University of Virginia put participants alone in a room for fifteen minutes with nothing to do, no phone, no book, no music. The single available option was a button that, when pressed, would deliver a mild electric shock. Sixty-seven percent of men and twenty-five percent of women chose to shock themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts. Isn’t this insane, our need to escape our lonely minds?
Instead of hitting a button for a literal shock, my version of shocking myself, the practice that helped me learn to love being alone, is a fierce refusal to be bored. Every time a mild sniff of boredom comes my way, I drop whatever I'm doing and change the register. If I am writing, I go paint. I garden, dirt under nails is a rebirth in itself. I cook, watch a movie, read a book, or cut the grass. I put on a podcast and clean the house. It doesn’t really matter what it is; shifting your focus is how you gain power over your mind, over the loneliness, and over the boredom.
Once your mind knows how to generate its own electricity, you can finally afford to sit still with the silence.
Sit by yourself, looking at a tree, wondering if the chirping bird on that branch is shouting murder or luring someone for sex. When you know you have the power to fill your world, you have the power to sit with the empty room, too.
And once you learn to do all that, you discover that other people are not the problem. Other people are witnesses of your life. They are there to see you, to receive you, to add their strange and wonderfully weird light to the space you already inhabit. That’s a different thing than generating your peace for you. It’s really a different contract. And it’s a better one, because it requires them only to be themselves, and you only to be present enough to enjoy their presence. This dynamic is perfect because it drops the pressure of performing for another, of filling someone’s life, of being their core.
So, go do things! Your question isn’t when someone will come and fill the room. Your question is what will anyone find when they come visit your mind. And I, for one, just love to make it a great, a tad scary, but fun labyrinth of surprises.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious mind?
Thank you for reading my work!
Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!
I am a full time writer at the moment - I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and essays or dystopias when I’m really digging into possibilities.
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I am a published writer. Curriculum of Feelings is a haunting, six-part journey that spans centuries and species, a visceral exploration of the “Problem of Evil.”
Through a collection of short stories, you follow five distinct vessels: a poetess silenced by her world, a slave who finds freedom in language, a tree that witnesses history’s worst acts, a whale carrying a dying song, and a boy tracking a collapsing future. Each life is a lesson in humility, humanity, and pain.
Brilliant piece; what a fabulously strong and inventive and disciplined mind. It was a joy to be allowed in. Thanks
The fear of being alone is so tied to the need to buy. If we began to seek the boredom and joy of our own company we’d be quite the threat to capitalism.