Lonely, lonelier, loneliest
Loneliness has followed me since childhood. I struggled to make friends in elementary school onward, and social situations have forever been difficult. Part of the cause is anxiety, another part is neurodivergence, both things totaling up to feeling lonely. As I got older, I fell into the trap that a lot if not most people do which is thinking that if I found a significant other (in my case a boyfriend) it would get easier, the loneliness would go away. Once I made it to high school, then college, I’d make more friends and could plug the hole that was causing the leak in the boat of my mind. I’m sure you can guess where this is going. I made friends in college, dated, graduated, and then got married. And still the loneliness persisted.
People have been using that feeling as a creative theme for years in the form of poems, songs, painting, sculpture, photography, movies, you get the picture. The word lonely was first used around 1598 so it’s not a new emotion. We can’t blame this one on cell phones, social media or even the 40+ hour work week, or rather, we can’t blame it on just those things. So, what does it mean? Where does it come from? Two of the definitions found on Dictionary.com are “being without company,” and my personal favorite “not frequented by human beings.” That one makes me think of aliens and a remote forest somewhere, or maybe even a lighthouse, think less Thomas Kinkade paintings and more Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X.
I don’t think being lonely is necessarily a bad thing. I think there’s even an argument to be made that it can be crucial to creativity. Consider the paintings of Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road, 11,” “dim/i/nu/tiv…” by E. E. Cummings or a few of the movies made by A24. These works and plenty of others are based on and feed on the feeling of being lonely. So maybe loneliness can be used as a tool. Is it possible to find or create connection with others who feel alone? I hope so. I often think about these lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing:” “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.” For those of us that are surrounded by or even drowning in loneliness that could become our motto, our lighthouse.
Blog Art and Writing By Author: Sally Steele-Corbett (@hippiejayne)
