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I have a confession: I am lonely.
Living a life as a college student, I see hundreds of my peers on a daily basis. People who probably, more often than not, share similar experiences to those of my own. I see my fellow students yet, I feel separate from them. I feel misunderstood. I feel alien and unnoticed. These feelings could simply be the result of undiagnosed narcissism, but that’s not the case, or at least I don’t think it is. I feel like I see them only from the outside, much like a pedestrian on the street looks into a store only from the outside, window shopping. Void of any reason to actually go in the store, despite the inexplicable desire to do so. I feel the need to connect on some level with people, but for whatever reason I can’t, or the task proves difficult, or daunting. So, instead I just keep to myself and allow this lonesome feeling to persist. I allow myself to believe the thought that “other people don’t have time for me” because that’s what they mean when they say “I’m busy” or whatever excuse people use when they are being fake. Loneliness is a terrible thing because of what it does to one’s thinking and morale. It is destructive and draining, unsettling and saddening, misleading and painful.
I just wanna say that I have two great roommates who are also my best friends at school. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without their company and friendship. We even bond at times through our mutual feelings of social isolation. Even then, considering I have these foundational relationships in my life, it is still very easy for me to feel distant and separate from others. I see what I think could be, but do not actualize. I genuinely try to cultivate relationships, but generally one way or another these attempts at developing intimacy fail. It wasn’t until I came to college that I began to feel this depth of lonesomeness.
Some people often consider me to be a social butterfly because I have several acquaintances. Comments similar to these only highlight how far removed I am from some people, that they don’t even know how I feel. They know little of how many actual friends I have, or lack thereof. They know not of my desire for intimacy. They know not of the failed attempts to connect and relate with others in my social life. Am I asking for too much? I’m not sure. I don’t know what too much is or what it looks like. It is very easy to speak to someone for five minutes in an informal setting and still have absolutely no idea what that person is like or what they may be going through. I feel like the culture we live in today makes it frighteningly easy to live a lonesome existence, or at least an existence where it is easier to hide one’s pains and troubles than it is to share one’s successes. In a society where social media and all media in general is so accessible, it has never been easier to have your voice heard by dozens, or even thousands of people and yet still have actually spoken a word to no one. It’s crazy. The fact that I am lost as to of how to cultivate relationships, both platonic and romantic bother me. I oftentimes don’t even know where to begin. I do know, however, I am not alone in my lonesomeness. I take comfort in this fact, for to know that others share this experience make everything so much more bearable. I am not here to offer any solutions or insights, but only to write about loneliness because this is something that has bothered me from time to time. Maybe someone who will read this can relate and get some sort of reassurance or comfort from it. I had to address this feeling, because most of the time I brush it off as no big problem, when in actuality I more and more frequently find myself disturbed by it’s presence.