Lonely is a Freedom

I am alone a lot.  I’m a loner, an introvert, antisocial, solitary.  I like my privacy, my space, my me-time.  We have a lot of ways to describe being alone.  It’s a facet of not just our culture, but of all of humanity that we know what it means to be alone.  Sometimes we yearn for it; sometimes we fear it.  But like any good English word, there are many meanings to the word, many shadows cast by this one idea. 

In the connotations of the word “alone,” you find negativity.  There is something about being alone that is up to no good.  People who are alone too much are maladjusted, awkward, maybe even creepy.  I understand this—it’s part of human nature to seek out human interaction, and so I do…from time to time.  But there are ways to make loneliness work, to make something out of alone.  There is comfort to be found in the solitude, in the many ways that we are separated from others.

Tonight, I am alone in that there is no one around me.  I live in a tiny apartment that wouldn’t have room for anyone else.  There is no cat or dog or fish or gerbil or snake or lizard to keep me company, and though my computer and my car have names (George and Baxter, respectively) I don’t really count them.  I am alone.  This, however, is what I call solitude.  It is the mental space where ideas are born, the blank canvas in my mind.  Without solitude, I wouldn’t have my art.

In this stage of my life, I am alone.  There is no man (or woman, in case you were wondering, and no, that’s not the way I’m looking) to speak to me, to call to ask me to dance and “murmur vague obscenities” as Janis Ian would have it.  There is no commitment, no connection, no fireworks, no deep understanding between myself and anyone else.  This doesn’t really bother me.  I fully believe—maybe because of blind faith, or my romanticism, or because of that one tiny relationship line my friend read in my palm last year—that I will find that person, that one, and I look forward to that day with all my heart.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying not having to tell anyone to flush the toilet, and the fact that things stay where I put them, and the fact that I can look at photos of a naked man reclining on a motorcycle if I like.  And I do, when that man is Adam Levine.

And in this world, I am alone.  As far as I can tell—and I’ve only had twenty-odd years to explore, so I could be wrong—there is no one else on earth who thinks exactly like me.  There are a few who have come close, but there is no one I have met who puts thoughts together the way I do.  I think that everyone is alone this way.  And that’s the hardest one of all to bear, and sometimes I don’t manage it.  It makes me wonder, sometimes, how we understand each other at all.  But then I think about a quote from a movie I saw recently, some rom-com that is only memorable while you’re watching it.  Except for this quote: if we’re all alone, then at least we’re all together in that.  And that is true.  We can all understand how it feels to be different; we can all understand what it feels like to be alone.  And there is a wonderful paradox, because it means we’re not alone after all.

So here I am, alone, and I don’t mind at all, because it turns out alone is a wonderful thing.

The title of this post is borrowed from a wonderful poem by Tanya Davis called How To Be Alone, which says much the same thing as I do here, but in a more beautiful and captivating way.  As for the Janis Ian song I referenced, it is called At Seventeen.