Thoughts on Love and Loneliness

Being lonely isn't a character flaw.

Your loneliness? It’s not just a mind’s trick or a test or a matter of perspective. It’s a fundamental human longing for the fulfilment of a fundamental human need. You’re not weak, foolish, or naive for being lonely. Your loneliness isn’t there as a reprimand, teaching you that you’re doomed, that you’re too damaged to give or receive the love you seek.

Your loneliness is there to remind you what this is all about. The loneliness flares up when you shine light on the broken pieces of yourself. You shine the light on them, not so you can assess the damage and cut your losses. Rather, you do it so you can learn what love is. And you start by learning its shape, tracing your fingers across the jagged edges of the holes that mark its absence. That vacancy is where you start.

After acknowledging the wounds, you learn to understand what they are saying, and you decipher exactly what it is they are crying out for. Once you make out what that is, you begin applying it in any way you know how.

You absolutely will do it poorly at first, and the majority of the time afterwards. But if you keep trying, you will learn precisely what you need (what you have needed for many, many years), and you will learn how to give it to yourself. You will come to understand that, although the word we have for this missing filling is love, it takes on a hundred thousand different meanings as it patches up a hundred thousand tiny cracks inside of you.

The more you heal inside yourself, the more you recognize the presence of both love and wounds like your own in others. Eventually, you will learn to accept the love others offer you, growing beyond the urgent, temporary need to only create it for and receive it from yourself. Eventually, you will want to give love, in whichever of its manifold forms is needed, to others. And you will give it. You will give it as someone whole, someone who is herself, not as someone collapsing inwards because there is too much emptiness that she cannot bring herself to look at. That is what the loneliness is for, that is what it is calling you to.

Love is the end and it is the means. It is the lesson and it is the teacher. It teaches even from the places it is not, if you are brave enough to look.

Image credits: “Automat” by Edward Hopper