A writing prompt asked me, âwhat is a question you wish people asked you more?â and I thought about loneliness.
As always, I am emotional over something, emotional over nothing, emotional over IVE singing that the alternate versions of us are our older sisters or friends who keep us company when we are confronted with the terror of never being Known as our true selves. I want it to mark something significant and hopeful that I see mine constantly, a private army of mirror spectres that follow me around, but I know that it just means that I am lonely all the time.
My sadness, like many things, often threatens to swallow me whole. When that happens, my therapist tells me to remember that this is something I have found my way out of before. I have known times without depression, life without anger, and nights without fear. The problem is that I have never not known loneliness, so I do not know what it is to live without it. I do not know how to live life without feeling like Iâve stepped into a puddle and gotten my socks wet. Something is supposed to happen here, but I can never tell what. Like something sat for too long in the oven because I forgot to set a timer. A state of constant distraction from my own life, as if I spend my days sitting dormant in a toy chest, waiting for the presence of another person to animate me.
I attempt to envision life without loneliness sometimes. I used to sit with my eyes closed, trying to think of the most impossible things. You try to emulate those people who spin new worlds at the drop of a hat and infuse them with the transformative potential of hope. In my small and intimate imaginations of a different world, all I could conjure was four walls and whitewash, without even the wherewithal to conjure a friend.
Someone said to me the other day, âIt must get hard living alone, doesnât it?â But my loneliness is not about being solitary, I donât think. When I lay out a single bowl for dinner, surround myself with a plethora of mugs that no one else uses; when I measure rice for one and butter just one slice of bread; when I do all of these things, I am in communion with myself. The loneliness retreats to a minor geography of my mind - this is perhaps as good as it can ever be.
In the rest of the time, I find myself aching.
Sally Rooney once said that not everyone deserves to be liked, but everyone deserves to be loved. Itâs why I try to love everyone, to make up for some kind of cosmic imbalance that I am convinced happens in this unfair universe. I am afraid that the opposite of Rooneyâs theory has come true. Maybe everyone likes me, but nobody loves me.
Agency isnât lonely. Itâs just terrifying.
I think the awareness of my loneliness first dawned on a winterâs night in a New York City diner. I sat opposite a boy under fluorescent lights in a vinyl booth, feeling very young. I knew that I could be mean, and I felt that I had the potential to be meagre - I was not deluded of my own nature - and I was desperate to conceal these tendencies from the world. Up until that point, I thought it was sufficient to assume the guise of someone who was neither, and that would be it. If the role was acted well enough, signalled an appropriate number of virtues, then nobody would ever be the wiser. It was in this state of anxiety that I hurt many people, including this person who I had roped into sharing an order of fries and a milkshake with.
I forget the impetus, but I remember clearly how I accused him of a manner of things. He was cruel, I said. He was thoughtless, I insisted. Did he even know anything about suffering? I asked. I did, I believed. I did. I did. I did. I was the only one who did.
Of course, these assumptions were untrue. How could they be otherwise? We are all tender in one way or another. But I wanted so badly to be right that I let myself be cruel. I believe that cruelty does something to the people who commit it, severs you from yourself, watched it happen to myself as my spirit floated away from my body as I was told, with a kindness, that I did not have a monopoly on suffering. It was significant that he was a boy who knew pain and that I had participated in causing some part of it. I ate one French fry after another, each one turning into sawdust in my mouth. Realized, stark and sudden, that I didnât like who I was.
It wasnât anything he did in particular. He simply looked me in the eye with a stubborn gentleness that made me feel that I should try to be better.
Outside, snow began to fall.
I think loneliness lives where cruelty does. For the first time, I realized that cruelty came to me as easy as breathing. The loneliness came rushing in soon after.
What it feels like to be a woman amongst men, even men that you love and who love you: Walking on a sunny path, the ground suddenly disappears from under your feet. You find yourself falling, desperately grasping for the edge. There is you, and then there is the alternate version of you interacting with the version of men that you want so desperately to believe in. Ever so often the veil between the worlds thin - thatâs where youâve fallen into.
We are told that being a woman alone is a terrifying thing, because so many things in society can only function if women are scared enough of being alone. They tell us that the antidote to female loneliness is men, is children, is service to family, is relinquishing agency, performing emotional, physical, and psychic labour that goes unpaid and unvalued. I know this maxim is untrue, because some of my loneliest moments are experienced when I am in the company of men, maybe precisely because I am in the company of men.
At dinner the Barbie movie is tabled for discussion, and I feel overcome with a radioactive rage at being a woman surrounded by men. The kind where my mind goes blank, my hands go numb, I remember what it was like to be twelve and afraid of my own father. I feel driven wild, as if something was being taken away from me by their perception. Their seeing was bothering me for reasons that I had not the strength to articulate, driving me up and down the walls of my own mind. I see my fingers tremble and my mind coagulating. My mouth fills with the sour taste of jealousy. Bothered by my own weakness, I thought about it for days. I felt guilty for being embittered, guilty for being a hater of men and ashamed that I felt anything at all.
All men think about the Roman Empire because it was a world without women. In these fanciful imaginations of the Roman Empire, men only need to interact with other men and violence was like the weather. When I think of the birth of Rome, I think of the sacking of Carthage, women bought and women sold, daughters slaughtered and wives driven mad. Women overcome, Dido falling on her own sword because the shame of being a woman cast aside by a man was more thought to be worse than death. When in history has ever been a good time for women? Only men are allowed to live ahistorically.
Ken is Kenough in a world where everything is abstract and intellectual. A world in which men are transient proves to be painful when even the transience has to be imagined. When you have always been absent, transience no longer bothers you. A constant choice between death and invisibility does not leave me with much except an aching gap where the entirety of my life should be.
But perhaps if I get close enough to a man, if I fuck the right one, history will deign to wrap its arms around me. What we know for sure about Dido is that Aeneas loved and Aeneas left. Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps someone might perceive me.
I know itâs a trap, but just because a rat sees the cage around the cheese, it doesnât mean that seduction is impossible.
If loneliness is not about the condition of being by yourself, then what is it?
When Shiv on Succession blurted, âMy father could not fit an entire woman in his mind,â I cried from the horrific truth of it, the state of un-personhood I occupy when I am with my father. The effort it takes to stitch myself back together into a whole person after he has deconstructed me feels insurmountable, and yet I find myself doing it daily. To be in community with my father is to be nothing at all. âHe was disgusted with me, and it was unacceptable: I must change,â wrote Amy Key about her own father. How convenient, for I can barely find the words for my own.
As an adult, I possess the knowledge that my mother has been alone in her marriage for as long as I have been alive. I used to wonder why, if loneliness is a shared condition of all women who live amongst men, my mother and I never found our ways to each other. That was before I understood my mother had spent most of her life trying to use me to buttress her own private tragedy, and that maybe she shouldnât have, because mothers can never make friends out of their children.
To some strangers I said, explosively, radically, terroristically, that I hated my own mother. For days after, I woke up sweating in the middle of the night, sick to my stomach that I would be struck dead by lightning for what I had said, but even more terrified at the fact that it was true. Perhaps it is Oedipal, the way I love my mother so much that I hate her, the way that I would rather die than live without her, but also the way that I think I might feel relieved if both of those things were to happen at the same time. Maybe if I died, my mother could live forever. I had excised parts of myself for her before. Why shouldnât this work as well?
When Freud wrote about the death drive, I wonder if he ever thought about an evacuated subject. Tiqqunâs Theory of the Young-Girl describes âbeings that no longer have any intimacy with [themselves] except as value, and whose every activity, in every detail, is directed towards self-valorisation.â Could a Young-Girl seek death if she cannot want anything? Or maybe, evacuated of all other desires, she would be the one who wants it the most, a single urge like a clarion in the dark. As it is, Freud did not perceive women, so I can only speculate wildly. My mother saw me, though, and never liked what she saw.
On nights when my loneliness is particularly acute, my evacuated self sits in the corner of my room and cries and cries and cries because it was her mother who cut her out of me. When that happens, I remember it is better to be lonely than to be nothing- Wait. Or maybe itâs the other way around? Maybe I would rather be nothing.
âThey call it love,â Sylvia Frederici wrote. They call sacrifice love because itâs easier than the actual work of loving.
next week: loneliness as praxis, being a Young-Girl, evacuated consciousness (I promise thereâll be an update is what Iâm saying)
Let me know if youâre feeling lonely: