Dearest friend,
A couple years ago, when I was around nineteen, the professor I was working as a research assistant for told me, out of the blue, that I was really gifted at keeping myself occupied without help from external sources. If he had chosen any other adjective for me, I might have taken it the wrong way, but now I think people who like to be alone tend to recognize that same quality in others, and among many things I am indebted to this professor for, one of them is that he never once questioned the way I did things.
Yet gift was a vastly different word choice than mere preference, and I did wonder if he was just being kind about me being, in essence, shy, or antisocial, or introverted, or whatever descriptors people over the years had swapped in place of my social anxiety. I stopped at that wondering, though, if only because if I didn’t, I knew I’d find a way to interpret gifted as a criticism. There were so many compliments I wrung dry back then until they were worth nothing, and while I’ve come a lot way since, I hadn’t really contemplated that one word choice from years ago until recently, frowning in the middle of watching Komi Can’t Communicate, an anime about a teenage girl with social anxiety so severe she’s unable to talk at all, let alone form friendships. It was easy to empathize with her, this fictional Komi, mostly because I recognized how frustrating it is to find yourself unable to do something so seemingly simple as just — talk. To the library staff, to a waiter, to a friend you want so badly to understand that they mean a lot more to you than they might know.
But every episode of Komi starts with the tagline, “When a person has extreme social anxiety, they struggle to communicate with others. Bear in mind: they only struggle to form connections. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to.” And at first I was nodding, agreeing, because to this day, I find it a wonder that I have had so many close, loving friends despite signs that point to me being socially anxious to the point of being too-private, maybe even standoffish, to those trying to get to know me. I used to pretend my phone was running out of battery when in fact I was terrified about staying on the phone but didn’t want my friends to think I didn’t want to talk to them. I used to have to be dragged down entire blocks before I could be persuaded to enter a store that we commuted an hour downtown for. I used to be clumsy and maybe too stoic in my love in person, but in texts and birthday cards, I could be more honest, more articulate without fear of otherwise. So I treasured the connections and relationships I did have all the more, valued the friends who didn’t question how I did things or thought the worst of me automatically by virtue of the things I was unable to do the expected way, loved the few who didn’t see me as unapproachable and loved them hard. Especially in my teenage years, back when I moved from school to school, one unfortunate life event to the next that passes me through me now, when I would have understood the things that would have made me difficult to love, difficult to put up with as a friend.
Yet I never really struggled or wanted on that front. Despite all the small factors in my life and disposition that should have ensured it, I’ve never really felt alone. I’ve been desperately lonely, and I’ve wanted things in my life to be different, for the people in it to be other people instead, for the empty spaces to be filled with all sorts of new faces — but alone was a separate thing, because alone was to me this void of nothing. To feel alone, I thought, is to keep your consciousness but little more. No stimulation for any of your senses, nothing to feel or experience. An empty way of being conscious, like a purgatorial afterlife of sorts. That isn’t loneliness, which is closer to melancholy. That isn’t solitude, which is closer to contentment. Aloneness is just — aloneness, and in that, I’ve never experienced it. Even when I was physically all by myself, even when, in literal terms, I had no one, I’ve never really felt alone.
So then I kept thinking about that tagline from Komi Can’t Communicate — “Bear in mind: they only struggle to form connections. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to.” — and I thought, sudden but not entirely out of the blue —
Do I want to form connections?
There was this Tumblr post circulating a while back, and I can’t find it nor even remember the exact context of what it was saying, but there was a thought there somewhere about how — Do you ever ask yourself if you only prefer solitude because it was so often imposed on you as a child that it became your norm? In other words, is one’s desire to be physically left alone a nature thing or a nurture thing? When I said a couple months ago that I’ll never want to be in a relationship, did that mean I should do some further reexamination of my ability to feel romantic attraction and desire for romantic relationships, or is it simply as I concluded in an addendum a bit later, that I am not in need of a relationship because I don’t require another person to find emotional fulfilment in living my life?
It isn’t that I’m against relationships in themselves. Especially not for other people, and not even for myself. Every story I have ever written could not have existed without the relationships that have produced each character, for better or for worse, and I know, at the end of the day, that each of us are products of the people that love or do not love us. We carry a little bit of all the lives we’ve touched, no matter how briefly, no matter how that one moment or period or lifetime of touch ended. We can erase so much about ourselves, but less easily can we scrub off the marks that others have left on us.
I know that. I know that intimacy and knowing and understanding are all the best that real, proper connection with others can bring. When we touch others and allow ourselves to be touched, we are so much more human that we would be otherwise, not because another person takes away doubt or loneliness, but because for once, in the ideal dynamic of any kind of relationship, you are not carrying the weight of living your life all by yourself. Whether it’s support that a familiar face gives you or escapism, when the breadth of your world expands, it helps, a little or a lot, to reframe the size of whatever you’re feeling. When another person sees you, really, truly sees you, it’s a different kind of feeling real than anything else you engineered into existence yourself. When you step out of the same small apartment you’ve been cooped up in for days at a time and rejoin the world, participate in all the various networks that make up lives far from your own, there is an internal, almost primordial understanding that human beings might not have been meant to live outside of the scope of communities. You can try your hardest to be alone and still, there will be other beings existing alongside your existence: a postman, a neighbor, a neighbor’s cat, a stranger in the same aisle at the grocery store, a plane cruising through a cloudless sky with several pilots and flight attendants and a hundred people, a hundred lives, enclosed in that small wonder of human invention. There will be birds and there will be dogs out on walks. There will be messages from friends or there will be emails from non-friends, non-people. There will be workers that clocked in hours to bring food to your table, whether it’s takeout or soup from a can, and there were workers that built the place that shelters you, whether or not you consider it home. It’s a self-centered thought, I realize, to ever think we could be truly alone in this world. We might feel alone in it, and we might be lonely or lonesome or alone with company, but there is never a point where any of us are not part of some kind of community. From the moment of birth, you weren’t alone: there were people helping someone give birth to you, and there were other babies in the nursery with you that day, all your birth times hours apart at most, all of them your age now, all of you untied by anything except the monumental fact that an entire lifetime ago, you were all born on the same day, in the same hospital, in the same city, in the same country, on the same planet.
And so sometimes I think — Is it not enough? To exist this way? People talk so often about how horrible it would be to die alone, but is it so bad, to exist only as one point in a world of people? Have I not existed enough with the very act of living? Must I seek out someone to live and exist with as well, all in the name of some promise that I will unlock a higher form of internal being by being with this person? It feels enough, to me, to exist as I am. It feels enough that I have a place to call my own, and people to call my loved ones. Does it need to be more? Am I letting a trauma response from a childhood lack or a childhood over-abundance go unchecked because safety behaviors so easily masquerade as defining traits for what I see as comfort?
It’s so rare, these days, that I resent the circumstances of my upbringing. I don’t see a point in overanalyzing it all until every bit is dust, if only because I find it difficult to move forward with the cards I was dealt by fixating on the origin story of those cards. What is simply is, and the most I can do is live my life while remaining the most me I can be in it. But I do wonder, what if being with other people compromises that me-ness? What if the happiest I am and will ever be is existing in the periphery of things, pursuing what feels to me like an internal world richer than anything the external one can offer in its place? I don’t consider myself an interesting person, not by a long shot, but I know I find my internal world far more engaging than most things outside. I think that’s what my professor meant, when he said I was gifted at keeping myself occupied without outside help. Even when I’m all by myself, even with nothing to keep me occupied, there’s still something. Something to think about, something to imagine, something to follow down a rabbit hole. I’m hardly ever bored, hardly ever alone because I’m hardly ever understimulated.
But then I read Bunny by Mona Awad, which centers a protagonist in an exclusive creative writing program, and it opened up so many questions about the lonely child to sentimental writer pipeline. Now I’m back at square one, examining my own thoughts on solitude and finding myself without any clear answers. Is it so bad, to feel most comfortable deep inside my mind? Is it so bad, to feel intruded upon when I have to exist with other people for longer than I feel comfortable? For the past few months, I’ve only had to live with one person at a time, but since late in April, I’ve been back to having to constantly co-exist with two or three people in the same house, and suddenly it doesn’t seem like much of an overreaction when I cracked last August and had to check into a hospital because it was the only place I could catch a break from people for a free weekend.
I felt guilty about having to do that. I still do, in some ways. One, because the melodrama is embarrassing in retrospect. Two, because I don’t know how to need a break from the people I love without them thinking it’s about something fundamental in who they are. There are needs and personalities I feel incompatible for, wrung dry and ill-equipped for emotions as I often feel, but how can you tell someone that in any words that won’t make it sound as if you’re berating them for who they are? That’s not what I mean at all, and it doesn’t mean I love those people less for how much being around others might diminish who I am. My capacity to be a person for other people is circumstantial and finite; my love isn’t. But it’s tricky navigating that, and often the work of navigation is a more draining labor than just putting up with certain things.
I think, at the end of the day, that this is the only reason I can’t see myself in a long-term, fully committed romantic relationship. Maybe, if there’s anything worth looking at in terms of nature versus nurture here, it’s in whether I was born without much storage capacity for all that relationships ask of me, or if it is that I’ve already had a lifetime of being responsible for other people that I can’t bear to commit to a full-time responsibility. Because it is a responsibility, isn’t it? To love other people? I’m tired of people taking it lightly, as if another person’s life and heart and mind are things you can be wishy-washy or half-hearted with, as if to be in a relationship is a fun endeavor you should leap into eyes closed, no holds barred. I’ve always thought that it doesn’t matter if I love few if it means I can ration the emotional inventory I do have and ensure I love the people and things that matter to me with as much as I can give. I can’t spread myself thin, because it would mean offering a thin, watered-down version of myself to others. But I also always worry if that, again, is merely me trying to justify the things I can’t do or offer as well as those more interpersonally oriented than I am.
I guess what it really is, underneath, is me worrying about whether I’ll regret it farther down the line. If I’ll regret how little I want to be with people, not because I have anything against people, or people against me, but because I truly think I am happiest in a world where I can peacefully exist on the outskirts of something. No one to whom I’m bound to report every single thing that happens, even the best, most celebration-worthy achievements or the worst losses. There is so much — person-ness, that the world requires of me in experiencing things, good or bad. A part of me is far too exhausted from things being required of me. I want to just exist quietly after years of having to exist for other people, and especially for figures who were supposed to exist for me yet couldn’t for even just a little. But I also have to wonder if — by dedicating my 20s to recovering from my childhood and teenage years — I’ll end up placing myself in a difficult position for when I’m even older, when all my loved ones have other people they have committed to, when all the things that feel enough and all I can ever want right now will suddenly be all I have, full-stop. A cycle of a period of failed living and loving, then a period of recovery from that, then another period to recover from recovery, and so on and so forth, neverending, more infinite than I could ever be.
I don’t know. This is probably what they call a quarter life crisis. I’ve felt very hopeless, recently, but over things that are much bigger than I can contain in one small body in one small life. The state of the world, for one. The state of my future, by extension. If I and the world can’t even love ourselves to the present right now, who’s to say we’ll be able to love ourselves into a future where that love is even possible?
I wish there were easy answers. So many things in life that I’m happy to keep interrogating until answers are no longer even useful, and so many things I’m prepared to tackle no matter how difficult, but just for this, I wish my desire to be alone, to love and observe from a distance, is enough. It isn’t. I know it isn’t. Whether or not I love or watch on, the world will continue to be what it is. Falling apart at the seams, held together by the people and systems who stop others from feeling helpless on top of hopeless. I want to believe in better, and I do my part as best as I can, to not fall into needless nihilism while I live a life much more privileged than that of so many, but I suppose this is what people mean when the world gets a little too clear around the time your birthday looms.
In the meantime, amidst war and disappointing Met Galas and overturned legal precedents and watching your homeland fall prey to misplaced and weaponized nostalgia and the labors of life we still have to finish despite all that, I am holding onto the small things. The days are harder to get through one by one, but that also means it’s worth double to be able to get through one at all. I am turning another year older in four days, despite it all. It’s always despite, these days. I have a life to live despite it all. I wake up to the spring sun despite how it feels like so much work, too much work, to look daylight right in the eye. I manage to eke out words for you, my friend, despite how much I feel, right now, as if every word I type is made of something slippery and green and not outright disgusting but so uncomfortable I can hardly bear it. Something natural but doesn’t belong where I don’t expect nor want to see it. Like mucus, or not-quite-right moss. Something I can’t help but reject in my mind, because not even the colors of nature can comfort me about having to be out at all in a world that feels wrong.
But again. Despite. I have people who love me and people I love, despite all the things, tiny and big, that could have decided I won’t have anyone at all. I am never lonely, never alone, despite the fact that I yearn to physically be left by myself when I get too little space, too little time, to exist as me. Yet I am also saddened when I am separated for too long, and too suddenly, from the people important to me, despite needing time alone and therefore time away from them. Time to catch my breath, count to ten. Time to know that I’ll regret it, that I’ll feel the loss of the people I love when it comes down to it and maybe it is this that I’m afraid of, and maybe it is for this reason that I want to not need them. Because I know it will hurt to lose love, and I don’t see why I should want all this when I don’t even need it. Because I know I don’t want to find out that even my best, rationed and polished as it is, can’t always be enough to save another person.
But also because, above all, a part of me knows that among the many things I discover Ursula K. Le Guin to have phrased perfectly, there’s a likelihood she was right as well in saying:
We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
My friend, I’m sorry I can’t write you a more cheerful letter at the moment. I hope you’re well. I hope you are loved, whether by a kind bus driver or the person most important to you. I hope you are living a life populated with at least a few despites that make it a life lived anyway.
Your huckleberry friend,
Sha
sha sha what can i say except from how lovely this piece is? of course this is a piece in relation to yourself but i can't imagine a more perfect time for this to arrive (ignore that im a day late). the other day i found myself in a Mood over the experiences that i don't feel robbed of but still want in some general fomo way. and this this sha was just a near replica of some of that feeling but from a different end, isn't it wonderful that your writing can capture this? feeling alone alongside loneliness as well is something ive had to sit with over the past couple years given the state of the world and i think prior to then i didnt know how much my sense of identity had been informed by the fact that i was always surrounded by others. fast forward to this past winter it had gotten to a point where i was repeating to my online friends that i wasn't a person anymore, i wasn't being seen or known by others that werent in the palm of my hand. on walks i find myself always looking into other peoples eyes wanting them to acknowledge that they see me and it works, sometimes. and sometimes a romantic relationship feels like it would cure that void and then i realize i would have to see that person as well, and i fear that i would crumble from that. that was a tangent i think what i'm trying to say is that is reading this reminded me of when my main human interactions were cashiers asking how id like to pay and uber eats drivers asking for directions and how i still cried about it last week and how a woman struck up a conversation with me while we waited for food and how that made me feel less lonely than the concerts and the clubs.
i am glad that you don't feel lonely sad that these months are heavy for you and glad again that you are loved and you know it.
im sure this doesnt make much sense but thank you truly for this.