Diary Entry 004: Loneliness is a Knife
and I've fashioned it into an an ugly thing
Disclaimer: I wrote this when my hormones were going CRAZY and thus, sending me into a spiral of thought and feeling so intense it could’ve generated electricity.
In all honesty, I didn’t want to publish this at all. No amount of physical exercise or throwing myself into my work could resolve the moments of loneliness that would creep up. So, I realized I needed to write this out to give it a place to live that wasn’t my head, but publishing this on Substack and my social media channels felt like an instance of vulnerability that’s akin to slitting my wrists open and asking someone not to look at the blood.
It’s dramatic of me to say such a thing, but I’m not someone that’s fashioned for a normal moderation of healthy feeling.
As someone who has never dated anyone, I don’t want to talk about feeling lonely, especially because it feels like such a trivial thing to focus on in regards to everything going extremely well in my life. Even more so, I hate talking about it. Not only do I have to admit that I’m lonely, but I have to debase myself by giving my loneliness utterance into the world through conversation. I don’t want to talk about this with anyone because all it does is leave me feeling like a broken record playing the same annoying song everyone has already heard too many times.
And what do I expect to get from speaking on it? What consolation can be provided to band-aid over the gnawing wound of loneliness. I’m sure everyone’s received the blanket statements every single person hates to hear, “You’ll meet someone when you least expect it.” or “Focus on yourself”.
Listen, it’s not a sin for a girl to want someone to match her freak. And I never understood these sentiments either, because I’ve done it all. I truly have.
I took myself to therapy. And I pried out the shards of trauma embedded in me. And I swam in the ocean. And wrote essays. And made more friends. And arranged floral bouquets. And put myself out there. And retreated again into myself. And feigned interest in love while peeking out the corner of my eye towards the horizon, searching. And moved to new cities. And lived alone. And grew out my hair. And clutched crystals in my palm. And whispered my manifestations. And traveled the world. And made gentle requests to the universe. And pleaded with the universe. And stomped my feet and screamed demands at the universe. I’ve tried it. I’ve done it. I’ve done it all.
I moved to a new city and within six months, I found a beautiful circle of friends and community connections that sustain me. I’m the mother of an old cat that is prone to smacking my toes and stealing my food. I work a job that provides me with a lot of work-life balance so I can pursue writing part-time as well as a myriad of my other hobbies.
It’s a life I dreamed of having since I was younger and I’m so grateful for it and the love that takes up residence through the crooks and crannies of it all.
So, when I go home at the end of the night to my own apartment, I do feel a satisfaction that I have built such a beautiful life for myself. But other times, I feel the all too familiar hallowness in my hands that are empty of another’s.
I saw a TikTok of a woman in her mid-30s talking about her life as an attorney living in NYC and how satisfied she is with her life, but hasn’t had a romantic partner for a long time. It felt nice to see someone I envision myself as (an attorney in a walkable city) appreciating the life they have but still requesting more. A smaller part of me, a more fearful part, was frightened at the prospect that in ten years time, I’ll be in her same shoes. To have everything I want with the exception of someone to share it with.
I don’t even have fear that I won’t have a family of my own, because I will thanks to a deal I made with my best friend and his future husband that I would have their child and we would all raise it together.
Other times, once I’ve worked through the loneliness, I am visited by the uneasy feeling I have at the thought that if I were to have that kind of love, the one that I’m searching for, would I run it into the ground? Like a starving person that is gorging themselves on food to the point it makes them sick.
There’s no real conclusion to any of this. No end to wrap this in a beautiful bow surrounding my writing as a present for you to unwrap and have. There’s just the continuance of it, of grappling with breathing life into each day and making peace with it as I go to bed each night.
