Brief Notes on Loneliness

Written in the aftermath of people

When I think of my childhood, I do not think of 5th-year birthday parties with a giggle of girls. I do not think of neighbourhood galli cricket matches or cycling in a queue. I think of myself, in front of the TV in my father’s room on an endless summer afternoon, alone. I watched cartoons, read books with the same cartoons on, drew something if I felt like it, fidgeted with the Fujifilm digital camera, or just stared out at the now-cut-down mimosa tree throwing patterns of light on our red oxide floors.

Looking back, it was a lonely childhood. There were no siblings to be bossed by or bullied around, no cousins for sleepovers, like-aged neighbours to entertain over snacks or friends from school over for homework. Of course, I had friends at school but I’d wash them off in the evening shower that my hygiene-obsessed mother insisted I take before stepping in. It also helped that I grew up in a time when children were not gifted with social media.

A description of this would invite concerns, serious shaking of heads, and sympathetic ohhhs. Loneliness does have a bad rep. The University of California, Los Angeles has a ‘loneliness’ scale which includes charming items such as I feel left out, No one really knows me well, It is difficult for me to make friends. But creatures of solitude like me know that the term ‘lonely’ is not always tragic. It is formative. It was in that deep solitude that I decided to study the law, believed in god, watched movies in silence, and wrote myths about myself to myself. Loneliness made me an individual. In my own company, there was no surveillance, no restrictions, no scrutiny. It offered a taste of giddy freedom.

For long, I’ve known the relief of coming home to myself, a home that I’ve protected ever since I can remember. I’ve taken the food away from the dining table and back to my room. I take the longest showers. I decline company on my late-night walks around my university. I’ve regarded solitary trips to the museums as a treat. I don’t schedule my lunches and dinners with others, I just walk in. There’s a sense of power in how you can keep yourself inaccessible. I like this quote from Jodie Foster about how there is a ‘deliciousness to loneliness’:

There’s a deliciousness to loneliness … There is nothing like the loneliness of lying in a pool of fake blood at three in the morning in Prospect Park with 175 people around you moving things and whatever—and knowing they will never understand what you’re going through.

Yet, I’ve accumulated people over the years. I am not a recluse, scoffing at the presence of people or a feral child unable to interact with my more socialised peers. I’ve always had friends. I am on the conveyor belt for a ‘people’ profession. I like to think I’m funny. Phone calls from friends on random afternoons feel like answered prayers. Some people have slipped in through the cracks and let themselves in, some more than others. I’ve willingly invited a few to my home, tried to show them the scenes from my windows, insisted that they stay there, willing to let go of my loneliness, and my individuality a little while longer for them. Forgetting ourselves is a way of love, and for some of us, the only way we know how to love.

Hosts and guests fall apart all the time, for different reasons with no one particularly being worthy of blame. So they leave. But my home now feels lived in by someone else. Nightly walks become impossible without thinking of the infinite space between the self and someone else, in some other place, in some other home. My loneliness is disrupted. It has ceased to be that space of control and become more like the loneliness that poets into sanatoriums and that doctors are supposed to analyse. I set myself to fixing everything, recovering myself, in silence and all alone, and aching, but at least, I have myself here. I’m not sure if I should look for new house guests.

Perhaps this is why some of us are addicted to being in solitude. We know that there is much reward to losing oneself a little bit and that some people are worthy enough for our identities to fizzle out a bit. Some of us, at some point, have been going around searching for someone with whom we can be a little less lonely with. But as another writer says, “What if one becomes only a weak prism, reflecting the light of those who have risked diving deeper into themselves? What happens if we do not risk loneliness ourselves?”

Or worse still, what happens to us when the light of the other fades?

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