Alone or Lonely ??

 

Everyone says I’m not alone, so why do I feel like I am?

Friendship, relationship & situation-ship are all circumstantial. As human beings, we often perpetuate from an end of having too many friends to another end of having none. We enjoy both, we despise both and we are comfortable with both the terms. Does age, experience and distance have something to do with it? I am not sure, but at this point in life, a lot of outward relationships are either a happy blur or a comfortable clear.

I grew up in a conflicting nuclear family of 4 members, conflicting because our guest room was never vacant, because we never really were just us as a family and there were always people in and out. That could be a reason why some of us often do not look for outward relations if there is so much happening in the living room & backyard.

My growing up years were constant mobile life with a dozen change in schools & hence friends. It was like adding a handful of fruit loops to the bowl once the existing fruit loop in the bowl settles into the warm milk. I knew I could not manage them all but had the bowl full anyways and always. This constant mobility, now I feel, always made me switch on the reptilian brain trying to survive, detecting threat and being alert about the changes in life. These changes often do not let me relax, let me trust the surrounding and confide to the people I meet. Best friends remain a myth from then on.

Not to be judged as an absolute looser of a narcissist, I have made friends who are close and chime...…some stayed while some fell through the cracks. Some friends during these journeys went in our separate ways and never grew apart. Hence, my closest friends are evidently far away. We are OK with that because that’s how life happened. We generalised being far away. We became comfortable with separation and before we realised, we looked forward to the relationships we built around our disconnected lives. We are disconnected like our mobile phone services, which we continue from where we left when the connectivity is back. Lovely, immaculate and wonderful.

On the other hand, with people around me, I don’t click on small talks, birthdays, children and societal pressure of the forbidden topics. We don’t connect at a deeper level with masks of superficiality and confirmation bias. Then comes the problems called social media which are symptoms of greater issue, rather than the cause where my surrounding devours themselves in front of filtered lenses to capture the perfect selfie. I simply & apologetically choose to remain in the glory of my own solitude.

Tough times often make us stoic and a fiercely independent person.  We don’t align to a group of hyper-polarised people who forces high levels of conformity and docility. I cannot discuss endless diets, fasting, podcasts, self-love, self-care & fitness regime. Every judgement, from this point onwards, manifest 10-fold making it impossible for me to connect, be vulnerable, or feel an emotional closeness with these individuals around. Who will ever again talk about empathy, books they read, art they do, a real movie, food, a small adventure, a big plan, some heart-breaks, some healthy gossips, and some ambiguities of life.

Where are these people living, scattered around the world, in their own corners?

Every one of us who feels they are alone are truly together.