‡ — Write.as

Loneliness

This is a subject that has concerned me for as long as I can remember, dating back to even being a child. For the longest time I confused loneliness with being alone and for the past years with not feeling seen. I thought being seen would somehow make me feel less lonely in the world, until it happened and it was fleeting, gone just as quick as it arrived.

The more I searched to understand this feeling, the more I tried to grasp it through the lens of logic. I though it could be explained through childhood or family, or through a rare to match depth I've always carried. If only someone could truly see me then that recognising would make me exist in the world. The more I got to know myself, I thought anyone who also knows themselves would surely then also see me. They do, and it still is there.

It's a loneliness that isn't life consuming. It's not feeling alone. It's not life damaging. It's just there. And it's been taking me the longest time to really understand the shape of it.

In a way the search for this answer has been one of the greatest gifts because it's only when I started to understand separation that I could understand unity. I think this loneliness is the most human feeling there is. The one that moves people to question and in the search for answers they might or might not find the true essence of life. I wondered if I feel it deeper than others but I believe everyone feels it. It's just that most of us don't sit long enough with it. Too busy with life, with family, with relationships, with screens, with distractions. This loneliness is existential and cannot be looked at through noise. Eventually, not examining it leads to despair of the soul, and that's the whole point Kierkegaard tried to make and even years later I still find myself going often back to him.

I've been coming to terms with the fact that this loneliness can never be met because so is the human experience. I am separated from everyone else and no one can ever know my full shape in it. The loneliness craves unity but unity is not available in it. It can't be. But because it knows unity and has forgotten what it is, it spends its time yearning for it. It yearns for something it cannot possibly have.

The beauty in it is that that yearning is the door to knowing yourself. All the beauty about life comes from it. It's the biggest driving force a person can have. It makes us question, examine, search, and truly know who we are. It's the driving force behind all philosophy, science, poetry, and ultimately love.

And it's just there. Sitting with me until the end, to remind me i exist here but it's not all i am.

these waters are unfamiliar to me and run deep. who are you?

to stay present with the not-knowing is not emptiness but the most alive place there is.

I feel things in full color while the world around me lives in grayscale and calls it peace.

maybe I'm not broken| maybe I just love the way I was always supposed to open and loud, even when no one claps at it

I am learning to hold my own hand while walking toward someone who might never walk toward me

and that's not pathetic, but the practice of becoming someone I don't need to apologize for being

life lately /

You found me. I was like you once. I searched for answers in books and places I thought right but left me more confused. I tried to put into concepts what can’t be explained.

Stop here. Let the voice in your head ask itself: do I exist?

Something just answered. What was that? A child knows it exists before it knows what existing is. That knowing cannot then be a thought.

But does the knowing know it’s not a thought?

contradictions i am full of them at times.
logic dominates my perception,
fully aligned with who i truly am.
yet a sense of doubt can still set me
back, and thinking becomes dominated
by the heart. such is the human condition,
which i find difficult to accept within me,
wanting to be holy while human.
this has been my biggest challenge,
accepting that condition means coexisting
with this body and time.

asking others for reassurance,
knowing well i do not truly need it.
the body has ways of acting
i do not always expect,
learned behaviors shaped by a wounded ego. for a moment i forget i am human
and turn my anger inward,
but somewhere i remember
i am not too much: i am simply human.

i find extreme beauty in this so many layers a human has, no flat lines. and still at times feel shame in it = contradiction

I have been thinking about grief. It occurred to me that Western society makes a big taboo out of death. We sugarcoat death to children. When someone passes away, we will say they went to heaven or they are with the angels. Usually, that’s pretty much it. It’s common that a child won’t attend a funeral because people are afraid it can disturb the child’s development. Even if the parents aren’t religious, most people don’t know what to tell a child when someone close dies and will use some myth or fantasy story.

I don’t think the parents are to blame. They were brought up the same way. Our society doesn’t know how to grieve. Death is seen as negative, something bad that happens, but what if dying isn’t bad?

How can we be a society that celebrates birth and not death? Aren’t those two the same coin, just different sides? Doesn’t everything you know as matter get born and then die? It reminds me of a poem from William Blake:

Little Fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away.

Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?

For I dance And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life And strength and breath And the want Of thought is death;

Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.

This poem has always fascinated me. When I first read it, I felt almost like a eureka moment. I am just like a fly. We both live and we both die. Maybe death just needs to be perceived differently than what it is.

I think we are failing to educate children about death. Such questions shouldn’t be answered with storytelling of myths or fantasies. The same goes for the question of how babies are born. Why is it easier to tell the story of a stork than to explain what happens in an intimate relationship?

I remember in one of the therapy sessions we talked about my mother’s death. I told my therapist that after she died, I didn’t process it in the best way. I didn’t talk about it to anyone for years. I made a whole new friend circle that didn’t know about it, so I didn’t have to talk about it. It took me years before I opened up about it. My therapist said that it wasn’t on me. There was no space for me to open up after her death. Everybody just moved on and tried hard not to talk about it and not to cry. You gotta move on. This idea that being strong is not crying and moving on was very present in my family indeed. My therapist said something I will never forget: „no one asked you how you were doing, no one was crying in front of you, no one talked about it, not even with each other.“ But it’s not their fault either, they just didn’t know better.

All my words are tired But they still show up; Poems felt easier when I Suffered from existential angst. Now I bore myself with My own words trying To put a verse together. If my voice had a New shape it would be political. I’m done with love poems!

they tell me the system is broken but it’s only true for you and me. I have been ripped of my essence, sold it for a few cents. everything has a price, including my integrity. my life is a paradox, I reek of hypocrisy. 404: error integrity not found. my parents were colonizers I buy iphones. I call myself an anarchist but all i do is reading books. occasionally I write a blog entry. I want to scream at the top of my lungs: nothing is lost yet. your labor is your power strike