Back in my 20s and 30s, when most of my peers were married & raising kids, or at least spending their free time chasing the opposite sex, I, being single, childless, & gay, didn’t have any friends to hang out with. I lived with my mother (the best mom in the universe), & I can remember being occasionally embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t have anything to do. (Although I had never come right out and told her I was gay, simply because we didn’t talk about such personal things in the first place, I’m sure she knew by that time because she could see that I was simply not interested in men, period.) Anyway, on Friday and Saturday nights, I would frequently go out in the car & drive around by myself, or go to the mall, just to make it look to Mama as though I was at least going out with friends. But I wasn’t, since they were all busy with their honeys or children or whatever else. The point is that during this time, which was many years ago, I had plenty of practice in dealing with loneliness. Since, apparently, most people don’t deal with their own loneliness until middle age (such as when they divorce), I think I should try to share what I did, because it worked. I never ever feel lonely anymore.
I think the key that most people seem to miss is that in order to triumph over our loneliness, we must confront it head-on, which means we have to allow ourselves to BE alone and to BE lonely if we want to be able to get to the point where we are no longer vulnerable to loneliness. Our culture is partly to blame for this mistake, since it teaches us 24/7 that the normal thing to do is to be not only involved with people but also with them just about all the time (or at least talking to them on our cell phones). There’s basically no cultural recognition of the value of solitariness or solitude. Also, the prevalence of antidepressant medications (which I am not against if the person really needs them!) means that many of us are encouraged to treat our unhappiness (our existential despair, if you will) with pills instead of spiritual advancement, of which coming to terms with our aloneness is an important part.
Anyway, let me try to describe some of the things I did that ultimately worked to bring me to a position where I was comfortable with my status as a solitary creature, so that I never felt truly lonely again, no matter what happened. I say “truly” because sometimes I still do feel occasional brief bouts of loneliness, usually after spending more time with others than I’m accustomed to spending, but it’s never a lasting or deeply rooted feeling the way it was before I did the work. However, let me make this point upfront: overcoming your own loneliness does not mean you have to become a hermit like me! It simply means that you’ll be able to enter into and maintain relationships that aren’t based on your need to escape your lonelness. And yes, I do have plenty of deeply fulfilling friendships and family relationships, even though I am a self-imposed hermit about 90% of the time. So I hope no one will shy away from doing this work for fear of becoming like me! I love my life but I know most folks wouldn’t.
The first thing you have to do in order to confront your loneliness is simply to let yourself BE alone instead of doing the more common human thing and seeking out others at all costs. (Scott Peck didn’t call the process of psychic and spiritual maturation The Road Less Traveled for nothing.) In addition to spending some time alone, you have to feel the pain of loneliness. So resist the temptation to medicate it away or distract yourself from it in any manner. You don’t necessarily have to try to make the pain even worse than it would normally be, but you do have to FEEL it and embrace it in your mind. This isn’t fun, of course, but actually you may experience a certain relief over knowing you’re feeling your pain & loneliness, yet surviving. Also, it is perfectly alright to cry. (No honest show of emotion is ever wrong when we’re alone before God.) I personally don’t recall ever crying over general loneliness, only over feeling rejected by specific people, but I’m positive crying is OK with God.
In order to fully confront your loneliness, I think you need not only to feel the pain of not having anyone around but also, if you possibly can, to experience the sensation of dangling, solitarily, over the abyss of space & time, of feeling as completely as you can your own quota of existential despair. This means trying to imagine your aloneness in all its horror, just as vividly as you can. There’s a house on my running route that looks kind of like a haunted house against the night sky because it sort of frames a small portion of the sky so that all you can see in that portion is gray desolation. You can tell it’s the sky, & it’s vast & even infinite, yet there’s also, eerily enough, nothing visible in that particular patch of sky. No stars, no moon, nothing. Just gray bleakness. This seems a good illustration of the abyss we find ourselves in when we confront our aloneness in the universe.
Another location for the emptiness is within. As you try to confront, with your heart & mind & soul, the void of aloneness & nothingness, if you’re like me you’ll find that right there in your own stomach is the first place you can find that void. If you don’t like the idea of feeling the aloneness, you can reason it into view. I remember one time decades ago I was talking to an older person whom I admired because she seemed to depend only on herself and God for her happiness, and she pointed out to me, “You live alone & you die alone,” and I knew what she meant. No matter how much togetherness we have in our lives, each of us is alone in our corner of the abyss and in our relationship to our Maker.
Which brings me to the grand finale of the process of confronting your loneliness and triumphing over it. When you get to rock bottom (or before), you can then tune into your faith in the higher power that created you, and put you (and all other humans) into this abyss, and also created all the joy and wonder and order and love in the world as well. So you can conclude that your challenge is to believe in the Creator and the promise that you’ll soon be lifted out of the abyss, which is every bit as reasonable as the fact that we’re here in the first place, since we have no idea how that happened either! The glimmers of joy we’ve already witnessed (and surely all of us have witnessed a few, in the form of music & singing if no other way) are ample evidence of what the Creator has in store for us in the hereafter. Maybe we’re here now for the purpose of learning to align our hearts and minds with God and creativity and love instead of with the abyss of loneliness & despair.
If you don’t believe in any kind of higher power–well, I’m sorry, but I don’t know of any solution in that case. Maybe this is why it’s impossible to be truly happy in this life unless we believe in God.
Suppose, however, you do have a measure of faith and you have worked on confronting your loneliness, and you do feel better about your position in the universe. Now what? How can that translate into your actually learning to enjoy, or at least not be miserable during, the time you spend alone?
Well, since you now know that God is your only hope for happiness, then maybe you can imagine yourself in partnership with God trying to do whatever good you can for the world around you. Because this is what’s meant by spreading the kingdom of heaven, isn’t it? Or at least by the church as the body of Christ, doing his work in the world. And learn to pray, about everything you do, and for everything you want. I demonstrate the prayer aspect extensively in my book excerpts and sample chapter elsewhere on this website. When, by these and other means, you begin to make yourelf into a vital component of the kingdom of heaven, you can then feel close to everyone else who’s a part of it, as well as to God.
Getting into the habit of carrying on a dialogue with God may take a little work, but I think the fact that I carry on such a dialogue is a major reason I’m able to stay happy all the time, even when earthly things aren’t going so well. With regard to loneliness, you can try asking him or her not, “Why Me?,” but, “What do you, God, want me to learn from this experience of spending time alone, or of being alone in the universe? What godlike character traits are you trying to help me develop by putting me into this situation?” And then, try to put into practice what the philosopher Kierkegaard said he learned about prayer: that prayer is not talking but LISTENING.
Another tip about loneliness that helped me in the past was suggested by my dear friend & college roommate Dale, who pointed out to me that plenty of people who are in full-time relationships or marriages are lonely as well. This thought has helped me a great deal over the years. (Thanks, Dale!) Considering what I’ve learned about how the purpose of life is spiritual growth, and one impetus for spiritual growth is pain, it makes perfect sense that our existential aloneness and our propensity for feeling lonely are common conditions of human life. But this means that as soon as we acknowledge the possibility of growth & change in the face of loneliness, as opposed to the more natural responses of feeling sorry for ourselves or distracting ourselves with activities that are meaningless to us, then we’re already on the way to the happiness & deep joy that will be ours when we truly undertake the project of growing from the pain instead of stagnating in the face of it.
Another thing you can do to constructively deal with alone time is to get out in public and spread joy & kindness by interacting with others, even if it’s “only” the clerks at the all-night grocery store. (They usually put on happy faces while working, but that doesn’t mean they don’t desperately need your small kindness of eye contact & a bit of warm conversation.)
Another trick to staying happy when you’re alone, perhaps especially when you’re working, is to imagine someone you admire finding out about whatever you’re doing and being impressed. This is probably not as deeply useful as working on your spiritual growth or spreading kindness to others, but I use it occasionally, & it works for me.
I guess this is enough on this subject for now. (Sorry for the length of this post but it feels necessary to do justice to the topic.) Let me close by returning to that notion of finding the emptiness within my own gut. When I’m allowing myself to be disconnected from God (from the God of Love), I think my body does feel empty, even when I’m healthy. But when my mind is connected to the divine, my body is transformed so that it doesn’t seem empty at all, only a tad puny in comparison to the Almighty!
GOD EXISTS, GOD IS LOVE, and GOD LOVES US. Amen.
