Loneliness

"I am lost. Help me brother. Save my life before my doom. I am lost without your love. Save my soul, seek my room."

What is loneliness. True loneliness. I am an introvert, so I understand solitude. Solitude is nice, its comfortable, we need solitude. To be alone in our own space, immersed in own thoughts, it is one of the best feelings. To spiral down into deeper layers of imagination and analysis. Synthesizing possibilities about events and thinking about new ideas. Everything is good about solitude. But loneliness is an entirely different thing. You need solitude for yourself, to spend some time on your thoughts without any interference.

Loneliness is when you want to communicate and there is no one to listen or understand. There are circumstances when you want to know how others perceive your thoughts, get a feedback, provide new insights, generate contradictory views or maybe, simply understand the complexities that you are trying to comprehend. Inability to find someone who listens and respond is a kind of loneliness.

There is also a different kind of loneliness, where nobody can understand you because nobody is trying to. Most of the times they can’t try because the things are too complex for them. Maybe they are not even aware that you need them to try and figure something out. Maybe you are afraid that opening your mind might be the Pandora’s box will just drive them away. But when you have so much thoughts and questions inside you that you really want to share, it’s really difficult when you don’t find anyone to share it with. You gently learn to keep all these thoughts in some dark corner of your mind and focus on other things. But sadly, with time, things pile up and the only way to deal with them is to ignore them. Consider them as useless and low priority, just because there is no one in your life who have the ability, or the will to understand it. But the fact remains that these thoughts are important. You are just unfortunate that no couldn’t find anyone and that is the feeling of loneliness.

You rarely meet people who have the ability to understand these thoughts. Even when you do, it is rare to establish a level of trust and mutual admiration to finally open up these core ideas which are so volatile and demands intense effort. The funny thing is, they might have the same problems that you face and you can see how similar they are to you and how much they need to be understood. But there might not be a reciprocity in the process because they might not understand yours. With time, you tend to lose hope of ever being truly understood by sharing these core ideas. You build a cage for these thoughts inside so that they don’t pester you in your solitude so that you can be free to pursue other demanding works. This leads to loneliness.

When you are finally sure that you can never share these thoughts with anyone, you tend to detach from people. You will start to find peace in your solitude more often, slowing reducing your communication with people. People see this and feel that you are becoming less social or even anti- social. From your side, people are failing to reach you and you don’t want to waste time with them. This will slowly grow into a general alienation from society as a whole. You finally don’t want to interact with anyone because they are useless. Your solitude will become your sole peace and you will be isolated from all.

That is true loneliness.

When people you expect from, fail to reach you, you become lonely.

“You are high above us all, alone in the sky and you understand everything except how to land.”