"Alone"

When I was in 6th grade, my teacher had us all write poems. Being a "sensitive" child, I was overjoyed. I wrote a poem about being lonely, feeling like I had nobody to talk to. We had moved into town just a few months ago, and I hadn't made any friends yet, so the poem (if I remember correctly) was a pretty good representation of how I felt at the time.

When I showed the poem to my teacher, he laughed. He knew that I had 6 siblings, and he reminded me of this fact. "What do you know about being lonely?" he said.

What do I know about being lonely?

I think that my 6th grade teacher and I have very different definitions of what it is to be lonely. I did not correlate loneliness and lack of people around. I had it more aligned with the level of mutual understanding between the people who were around.

The sheer lack of people is a form of loneliness that few people have had to endure, and it is so painful that it's one of the most commonly used forms of torture. This other kind of lonliness, I am willing to bet, is far more common, and in some ways harder to recover from.

When all you lack is human interaction period, anything will do. Which is why solitary confinement is useful for interrogations, those kept in solitary will talk to anyone, will do almost anything for human interaction.

When the problem is mutual understanding, however, the solution is a little more difficult. The main source of the problem is within the lonely person. You don't feel understood, at times you feel like you're going crazy, and you're afraid to let anybody in. There can be a million reasons for this stuff. Maybe you're afraid of letting someone get that close. Maybe you're afraid of looking weak, or needy. Or, maybe you think that by sharing what's bugging you, you could risk chasing away those close to you.

Maybe my teacher didn't think I was capable of experiencing that depth of emotion at the age of 11. If that's the case then I don't blame him. Either way, I'm stuck with the same conundrum as I was in 6th grade, feeling apart, or disconnected, from those around me. And, just like in 6th grade, I'm afraid to take a leap of faith. I'm afraid to open, or I'm too tired, or I know that they don't want me to dump on them.

I can hear my teacher's voice in my head. "You live with 5 other guys, what do you know about being lonely?"

"Nothing sir. I don't know nothing."