Meditations on Loneliness

  Sometimes I want to cry out. I want to mourn everything I have abandoned. All the good I've ran from. The anguish, that special horror, that seems to breed in the silence I have created for myself, terrorises me. How have I let myself sustain such injuries? Purposelessness. Loneliness. I need to be careful when I meditate on the subject of my self-crafted afflictions. My wretched wounds. 

  For I never wish to try and create a false-equivalency between them and the things, infinitely worse things, that other people endure: life altering illnesses; the passing of a loved one; material ruin and poverty. 

  But loneliness is such a potent, self-multiplying thing. A thing with its own animus. You fall (in my case, jump) out of that social circle, withdraw from those nurturing bonds that sustain you, and quickly you disintegrate, like a plant without roots. The self is the thing that kills you, in the end. The judge without compassion, restraint. The voice without quiet. The dagger that never dulls. 

  In my loneliness, I am diagnostician, critically deconstructing aspects of my identity that others barely train an eye over. I am all analysis to the point that it borders on meanness. And I wish I could stop being so god damn ruthless with myself. Wish that I could stop hating me before I give anyone else the chance to know (and perhaps redeem) me. 

  And why the loneliness? I don't remember the start of it. Only the detonation that made it worse. But I think I know what propagates it. It's this fundamental belief that somehow, in the undercurrent of your own identity, there's something corrupt, unlovable and wrong. There's something other. Some toxic thing that you wish to protect other people from. 

  I just want to extricate myself from my tired mind. Want to find a calmness and a rightness that have evaded me for so long. I yearn and I yearn. I am without answers. But I do have to have hope. Hope that I will find people that won't let me give up & won't give up on me. Hope that I can build a kinder, softer, humble me. A more competent, present and thorough me. Hope that I permit myself the laughter that I love seeing other people partake in. 

  I'm not so different from other people. If I ardently believe the best in them - all of them, even the worst of them - why can't I believe in me?  

    Signing off, 

C.