existentially alone...
My very best friend in the world related a story the other night. she said she was in a group of people and felt more lonely within them then had she been alone.
and i was stunned.
not because the feeling is at all foreign to me, because i assure you it is far too familiar, but because she is the one person in the world that i look to as a truly open and wholly loving person.
she and i have strikingly similar backgrounds, in that our tragedies are nearly mirror images of each other. but she and i are not alike. she has responded to those tragedies by opening, becoming more purely a loving person to all around her. when her family failed her she went out and found another self chosen family that would be everything she needed, while still holding up her family of origin.
i responded to my tragedies by shutting down. i spent my young life becoming more and more invisible, by choice, by need. i kept everyone and everything at a safe distance, kept life at a safe distance. my adult life has been spent trying to let go of all the notions of life that as a child I clung to for preservation. it is no wonder I might have some camaraderie with loneliness.
but why her?
why would a person who is so loving and so well loved be lonely?
I have to admit that her loneliness terrifies me far more than my own. with mine I am on good terms. we are familiar and though I would not refer to it as a friend, I understand it, it is a part of me.
but hers, hers strikes at my belief that if I were a more loving person I wouldnt feel alone. becoming a more loving person is a goal I have had even before I met deb. and so seeing how it looks in her and how happy she can be, I thought for sure I was on the right track. it was just a matter of time. but now I am hallowed by the thought that loving may have nothing whatsoever to do with this ache that takes hold of my chest, strangling my breath. perhaps my loneliness, and debs, are existential. I am existentially alone.
and I dont know how to counteract that.
so I did just what any modern westerner would do. I googled it.
there was a lot about how interpersonal loneliness and existential loneliness were different, not even related really. as the former is dependent on outer circumstances and the latter is an inner experience. in one particular article (that I left without citing for you, my apologies) said that where as the former is something that can be combated with love, with relationship, with human contact, the latter remains untouched by these. where the former is present only in our relationships, the latter is all encompassing, touching all areas of our lives.
and it is here that I cried.
the author said that people often mistake the latter for the former and go out looking for love, and at times find it. then finding themselves past the novelty of love, yet still in love, they are again taken with the emptiness. thinking that it must be the love that failed them they move on to find a better more perfect love.
now this goes back again to the differences between deb and I. she apparently never confused these two and has always been able to have healthy long term loving relationships. I on the other hand apparently have been very confused. I have never been satisfied with the kind of conditional love that I received in what has become a litany of abandoned relationships. I have always chalked it up to a fear of commitment or intimacy, easy catch phrases. but I think now it is more this confusion. I was expecting to find a love, a more perfect love that would quell that fire, that would release that painful grip in my chest. shocking isnt it that so many men have failed. it was never theirs to succeed.
and so I wiped my eyes and continued on to find just what was the answer to this question. how to let go of my existential loneliness.
this I found to be a much more difficult question for google to find answers to.
there is one article that will be quoted here (and is linked below if youre interested) that though she did not give me any answers to how to get rid of the whole thing, did have a perspective that released a breath from my chest.
"For Wolfe, the experience of loneliness is neither strange nor curious, but 'inevitable and right' because it is part of the human heart. Just as the experience of joy is heightened by sorrow, loneliness, 'haunted always with the certainty of death,' makes life precious. Loneliness and death are thus inescapable facets of human existence, each ontologically necessary for a coherent human life."
and so I am not alone in this feeling, or even deficient.
"Loneliness is not the experience of what one lacks, but rather the experience of what one is. In a culture deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of autonomy and rights, the song of God's lonely man so often goes unvoiced and unheeded. It is ironic how much of our freedom we expend on power -- on conquering death, disease, and decay, all the while concealing from each other our carefully buried loneliness, which if shared, would deepen our understanding of each other"
so google, please to tell me, if I share this now with the world will it do more than deepen my understanding of the world and its of me, will it also cut the ties that hold me to my aloneness? but they said that connection with others bears no release for this existential variety.
"So loneliness, on this reading, isn't something to be shunned or afraid of: it is, rather, a possible catalyst for a more purposeful and engaging life, and an avenue for heightened self-awareness."
(http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/An%20Existential%20View%20Of%20Loneliness.htm)
well ok.
that is something.
I do hold this notion of a heightened self-awareness in the highest of esteems, in fact look upon the activity as a kind of prayer, even worship, likened to the eastern ideals of meditation.
but do we not look to this self-awareness as a way to transcend the mundane, the pain?
in knowing myself, will I feel less alone?
and i was stunned.
not because the feeling is at all foreign to me, because i assure you it is far too familiar, but because she is the one person in the world that i look to as a truly open and wholly loving person.
she and i have strikingly similar backgrounds, in that our tragedies are nearly mirror images of each other. but she and i are not alike. she has responded to those tragedies by opening, becoming more purely a loving person to all around her. when her family failed her she went out and found another self chosen family that would be everything she needed, while still holding up her family of origin.
i responded to my tragedies by shutting down. i spent my young life becoming more and more invisible, by choice, by need. i kept everyone and everything at a safe distance, kept life at a safe distance. my adult life has been spent trying to let go of all the notions of life that as a child I clung to for preservation. it is no wonder I might have some camaraderie with loneliness.
but why her?
why would a person who is so loving and so well loved be lonely?
I have to admit that her loneliness terrifies me far more than my own. with mine I am on good terms. we are familiar and though I would not refer to it as a friend, I understand it, it is a part of me.
but hers, hers strikes at my belief that if I were a more loving person I wouldnt feel alone. becoming a more loving person is a goal I have had even before I met deb. and so seeing how it looks in her and how happy she can be, I thought for sure I was on the right track. it was just a matter of time. but now I am hallowed by the thought that loving may have nothing whatsoever to do with this ache that takes hold of my chest, strangling my breath. perhaps my loneliness, and debs, are existential. I am existentially alone.
and I dont know how to counteract that.
so I did just what any modern westerner would do. I googled it.
there was a lot about how interpersonal loneliness and existential loneliness were different, not even related really. as the former is dependent on outer circumstances and the latter is an inner experience. in one particular article (that I left without citing for you, my apologies) said that where as the former is something that can be combated with love, with relationship, with human contact, the latter remains untouched by these. where the former is present only in our relationships, the latter is all encompassing, touching all areas of our lives.
and it is here that I cried.
the author said that people often mistake the latter for the former and go out looking for love, and at times find it. then finding themselves past the novelty of love, yet still in love, they are again taken with the emptiness. thinking that it must be the love that failed them they move on to find a better more perfect love.
now this goes back again to the differences between deb and I. she apparently never confused these two and has always been able to have healthy long term loving relationships. I on the other hand apparently have been very confused. I have never been satisfied with the kind of conditional love that I received in what has become a litany of abandoned relationships. I have always chalked it up to a fear of commitment or intimacy, easy catch phrases. but I think now it is more this confusion. I was expecting to find a love, a more perfect love that would quell that fire, that would release that painful grip in my chest. shocking isnt it that so many men have failed. it was never theirs to succeed.
and so I wiped my eyes and continued on to find just what was the answer to this question. how to let go of my existential loneliness.
this I found to be a much more difficult question for google to find answers to.
there is one article that will be quoted here (and is linked below if youre interested) that though she did not give me any answers to how to get rid of the whole thing, did have a perspective that released a breath from my chest.
"For Wolfe, the experience of loneliness is neither strange nor curious, but 'inevitable and right' because it is part of the human heart. Just as the experience of joy is heightened by sorrow, loneliness, 'haunted always with the certainty of death,' makes life precious. Loneliness and death are thus inescapable facets of human existence, each ontologically necessary for a coherent human life."
and so I am not alone in this feeling, or even deficient.
"Loneliness is not the experience of what one lacks, but rather the experience of what one is. In a culture deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of autonomy and rights, the song of God's lonely man so often goes unvoiced and unheeded. It is ironic how much of our freedom we expend on power -- on conquering death, disease, and decay, all the while concealing from each other our carefully buried loneliness, which if shared, would deepen our understanding of each other"
so google, please to tell me, if I share this now with the world will it do more than deepen my understanding of the world and its of me, will it also cut the ties that hold me to my aloneness? but they said that connection with others bears no release for this existential variety.
"So loneliness, on this reading, isn't something to be shunned or afraid of: it is, rather, a possible catalyst for a more purposeful and engaging life, and an avenue for heightened self-awareness."
(http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/An%20Existential%20View%20Of%20Loneliness.htm)
well ok.
that is something.
I do hold this notion of a heightened self-awareness in the highest of esteems, in fact look upon the activity as a kind of prayer, even worship, likened to the eastern ideals of meditation.
but do we not look to this self-awareness as a way to transcend the mundane, the pain?
in knowing myself, will I feel less alone?
posted by Solador at 7:25 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Solador,
That was a really interesting read, I don't know if it would interest you but I wrote something on Sartre's Nausea the other day. It gives a summary of the book, which is basically about the protagonist's state of existential lonliness (Nausea).
I've kept looking for that "one great love" with the perfect person and no such person or love exists. It's just a question of finding someone who understands you, treats you the way you want to be treated and you can make happy, I think.
Existential lonliness is realising that it's part of the human condition to alone in the world. I wouldn't want anyone camped out in my head at all. We all need our private worlds, love, I guess, is choosing to let a person right into your private world, give them priviledged access.
Interesting read - keep thinking!
Alex
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