Dancing with Loneliness
In June this year my flat mate of four and a half years moved out. Since then, I have pretty much lived on my own.
Before this, I lived in Kopano residence at UCT. Despite having a room to myself, I was surrounded by hundreds of people who I could call upon at any moment. Four of my best friends lived on the same corridor as I did.
And before this, I lived with my family for 18 years, meaning there had never been any serious period of being alone.
Coupled with my new state of living alone, I work on 3/4 different jobs or projects at a time with different colleagues, and none of these are on a full time basis. This means that no person or group of people quite know what I do (the opposite to this being a corporate job, where your colleagues experience the same environment as you for 40+ hours a week)
So over the past few months, I’ve experienced loneliness in a way I’ve never quite had to before. It’s a loneliness that can’t be solved by seeing friends or family, because ultimately you still go back home and are alone. There’s no one to pick you off the floor if you’re having a down moment, no one to make you food if you aren’t able to and no one to judge you when you binge Netflix for hours on end.
I’ve been learning to dance with this loneliness. Sometimes, it’s a beautiful waltz. One filled with tea and book reading and meaningful self reflection. Sometimes it’s a catastrophic attempt at a sokkie at 3am in a shitty Claremont nightclub, and I end up on the floor with no real sense of how I got into the problem or how to deal with it.
Today started off as a waltz and ended up with me on the floor of the proverbial nightclub.
While in this state, I stumbled upon a video by The School of Life titled Why we’re fated to be lonely. It started with the following intro:
“There are few more shameful confessions to make than that we are lonely… [however] its a part of being a human and it’s a built in feature of a complex existence”
I’m not going to attempt to summarize the whole video, it needs to be enjoyed on its own. However, one thing stood out for me that linked to yesterday’s post: that a fundamental component of this loneliness is that it is impossible to tell everyone what’s going on in your own head. As much as we try to share our thoughts, they are shaped by a multitude of complex forces that no other person has experienced. And we do not have the means to ever be able to communicate it.
The video offers a really interesting argument based on this. Given that this is a natural state, loneliness isn’t our fault and the mutual incomprehension that causes it doesn’t mean life has gone wrong… instead, it’s what we can expect.
Which means once we understand this, we can begin to accept it and start to expressive ourselves better, through writing or creating or even through enjoying the arts.
And so this brings me full circle, and back to my daily blog writing. I didn’t intend for this to be a reason for my blog, but I’ve seen that it has become a way to express myself. And every now and again, someone shouts “I feel the same!” and both of us feel a little more understood.
And as the video says “[Loneliness] heightens the conversations we have with ourselves… we develop a point of view and will be capable of far closer and more interesting bonds.”
So the dancing will go on, and I will continue to learn different ways to express myself. Be it through a tango, a waltz or even just a 3am dance in a nightclub to some 80s pop music.
Picture is from a solo mission to Kalk Bay earlier this year. I took the train there, swam in the ocean, wrote down goals for the year and had ice cream. It was a good day