Why Am I So Lonely?
We chase, force, and try really, really hard to be accepted in an effort to avoid our deep loneliness.
Human-ing is Hard
Maybe not everyone reading this will agree with me, but loneliness has to be the truest, deepest, and most painful part of living life. Why do I say it’s the truest part of living life? I say this because I believe so many of us learned at a young age to leave our own bodies and our own feelings in order to get love and attention from others. When we try to sit with and by ourselves, we often find that we don’t really know, like, trust, or care about who we are. We find ourselves to be boring and sad and, of course, lonely. So, loneliness feels like it’s a true and constant state of being for many of us. Loneliness happens when we don’t know how to be with ourselves because we have had to be with others (instead of ourselves) for so long.
Very often, we escape ourselves with drugs, alcohol, work, sex, food, codependency, exercise, shopping, plastic surgeries, love addictions, and in other ways because we feel so deeply alone in this world. Humans have a basic need to be accepted and being alone is very unacceptable, so it’s no wonder that we try really, really hard to never be left out. Trying so hard is like a fight reaction. Our nervous systems need to feel safe and fighting for love and attention so we won’t feel lonely and run the risk of dying all alone in the wilderness is a biological imperative. Or, it WAS a biological imperative back in the hunter-gatherer times when being apart from a group often meant life or death. Being chased by a wild animal, fighting off other factions for power and resources, or dying from disease or from freezing temperatures meant that we had to be in groups. Our nervous systems are primitive and they are still trying to keep us alive by fighting or fleeing from danger when we really don’t need to be doing this anymore. Even if we had trauma or abuse as children and our nervous systems did push us into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions and out of our bodies to tend to others, as adults we can now learn how to be back in our bodies and finding safety in our nervous systems.
While we do need each other today in different ways, we are still operating from a fight or flight response in many ways. These days, we fight for attention and love. We carve up our faces and suction our bodies in order to look acceptable and to secure a place in a family, a social situation, a job, or in a coupledom so that we won’t be alone, even if being in those situations still reminds us that we are lonely. When you think about it, are you still sometimes lonely even in the midst of a crowd? We settle for not being alone even if we really do feel lonely. We fight against life. We resist it. We don’t just let life be the way it is. We force. We put ourselves out there over and over again. We try too hard to “get” and to “have.” We demand love and we command respect.
We don’t let life bring to us what we need. We don’t trust that the universe really does have our backs. We don’t sit with our pain and let it wash through us. Afterall, feeling “negative” things feels bad, right? For as long as we can do it, we will usually avoid this pain and seek external everything—love, acceptance, approval. No one can actually help us not feel lonely, however. This is an inside job for every single one of us. We can love and connect with others, but to have them there as a security blanket so that we won’t feel lonely is not an actual thing. This is an illusion. No one CAN be that person for us at all times. And no one should be that person for us. And we can’t be that for them. Believe it or not, there actually will be moments when your own sad, lonely, boring feelings creep in and you have to face them. Have you noticed this?
Deep in the middle of the night in that silence when you can’t sleep it is there. It is in the stillness. Loneliness is a pretty scary feeling to sit with. If you have felt lonely for most or all of your life, then sitting with it might make you feel like you could lose your mind. Most of us will do just about anything to avoid feeling lonely. Many of us have done all the “things” we were supposed to do to be accepted and to never, ever feel lonely. We married the “right” person; we had all the parties and invited all the cool kids; we were perfect soccer moms; we coached the teams; we baked all the goodies for the bake sale; we sat on the school board. We lost all the baby weight and looked like the perfectly hot mom who never tires, always lends a hand, and has a balanced meal on the table by 5:30 every evening. We made all the money and took the family on all the great trips. Well now! So how’s that really workin’ for ya? Did that really make us less lonely or was it all a distraction from feeling the true depth of that loneliness that we have felt since birth?
Finding True Connection Beneath the Pain of Loneliness
Loneliness, like all emotions, is only a cover over the truth. The truth is that under this loneliness is a vast world of love, connection, and meaning. But most of us are really terrified of getting past the loneliness to that wellspring of connection. Or, rather, we are afraid to go into the pain of that loneliness in order to move past it into love and connection with self and that which is greater.
The secret to this is that we have to go through all that negative stuff to get to the good stuff. It’s not really a secret at all, actually. There has been so much written about this, but not many people will do it. Those who are enlightened have done this. They faced their greatest fears about themselves, life and death, and they transcended the pain. They surrendered into their pain and guess what they found underneath it? Joy! Joy is on the other side of that pain. We can’t spiritually bypass it, go around it, or avoid it forever. We certainly cannot “think positive thoughts” to make it all better. No. That is just lying to ourselves. We feel the truth of our feelings and THEN we will be in a positive state of being, which is an embodied feeling rather than a thought from our minds.
If we cannot easily surrender into our loneliness or other negative feelings, then don’t worry. Eventually, something will happen to us to force us to face it. This is when we start to awaken to the truth of who we are, which is beautiful and eternal love. We might have really painful things happen to us to get us to feel this pain—death, break-ups, natural disasters, the loss of a job, a disease, or anything else that creates a lot of pain and disappointment about what we thought was going to happen. We start to see that we are not really in control so much and that surrendering to what is happening and how we feel can actually become true freedom. It can actually bring to us what we REALLY want, too, even if we didn’t know it’s what we really wanted. In this sense, yes, the universe does have our backs,
Being Alone and Being Lonely Are Not the Same
When we stop self-abandoning (running away from our feelings), we start to BE with feelings like loneliness. We can start to have compassion and care for the part or parts of us that feel very lonely, scared, and sad. We can start to have a relationship with ourselves and ask ourselves what we like to do. We can start to pay attention to if we like to read, kayak, sing, or hike. We notice whether we really love being around people or if we actually feel more energized when we spend most of our time alone. Many of us had to abandon ourselves as children to cater to the needs and desires of the adults in our lives. Along the way, we lost sight of who we are and what we like doing. Sure, we might have done a lot of activities as children and maybe there were some we liked. Perhaps we had to do certain things to make the adults happy like play baseball when we really liked badminton better or studied to become a lawyer when we really wanted to be an actor. Now that we are adults, we can stop and reassess things if we choose to. We can sit with the lonely parts of us and feel that fear of being all alone on this big space ball. And then we can cry for that little one who feels all this fear. After purging all of this, we can start to examine who we are, what values, beliefs, hobbies, and goals we have for our own lives. And, the good news is that, once we have loved ourselves through that pain, those who are meant to be in our lives so that we won’t ever feel lonely again will arrive—in due time.
Being alone does not equal being lonely. In fact, the more we face our fear of being alone and get through our lonely feelings, the more we might start to really enjoy being alone some or all of the time.
