Taxonomy of Loneliness

there are many kids and types of loneliness

There are many kinds and degrees of loneliness.

There is the poignant loneliness of watching moonlight on snow in midwinter, or of standing at the top of a mountain, or being on your own in the center of a crowd in a great city, or snug in your house on a rainy Saturday, tucked under a blanket with a mug of something hot.

There is the sublime loneliness of the artist which sharpens sensitivities and heightens creativity—in small doses. There is the energizing loneliness of being misunderstood, which can come with a shot of “I’ll show you” stye resolve. There’s the delightful loneliness of the inveterate daydreamer, the kind that lets you imagine that the meet-cute is just around the corner or that the rescue is on its way. 

There is the hopeful loneliness of wanting to be seen, which can stave off the deeper, more ruinous, loneliness of being overlooked. You can go a long time on getting yourself and your life in good shape and ready to be seen and actualized and even fallen in love with—until the clock runs out on the planning.

There is the complicated loneliness of the mother of small children who is always the carer and never the cared for.  There is the bewildered loneliness of the mother who keeps looking for her grown children. 

There is the loneliness of men, which can never be voiced and is a much bigger part of masculine violence than anyone wants it to be.

There is the complicated loneliness of being married which includes being lonely when you’re with your partner and being lonely for your partner when you are not. There is the loneliness of being unhappily married. There is the loneliness of being jealous of someone else’s marriage. There is even the recreational loneliness of being happily married which is a form of being lonely for the person you used to be before you were married.

 There is the bracing loneliness of having taken a stand for something on principle and the disaffected loneliness of being an outlier or expat or other voluntary or involuntary outsider.

There is the loneliness of not speaking the language.

There is the loneliness of trying to explain.

There is the loneliness of living alone and wondering what will happen if you slip and fall or cut yourself. There’s the pathetic loneliness of being sick by yourself at home and the terrifying loneliness of hospital waiting and recovery rooms, and the humiliating loneliness of the kind of waiting room in which they relieve you of your shoelaces and any possible sharp objects. 

There is the sickening loneliness of having a kept secret.

There is the loneliness of feeling like everyone else is having all the fun.

There is the loneliness of wanting to tell someone about something funny or happy or beautiful that happened to you.

There is the loneliness of not knowing the other parents at the field hockey games.

There is the loneliness of what happens after sex.

There is also long haul loneliness, which is the accumulation of many, small, inconsequential lonelinesses. There are contours to the long haul kind; the opportunities and risks are more explicit.  You can assimilate to long haul loneliness, inuring yourself to its inferior comforts: avoiding the horrors of disappointment and vulnerability, the fear of failing someone you care about, and some forms of violence.  On the other hand, with assimilation comes the atrophy of certain important skills.  Just going out of your house can become a challenge. The world will seem noisy and demanding. Social cues will fly right over your head.  You will forget which side of the aisle to be on when you push your grocery cart. You will stand too close or too far back. Your voice will be too quiet or too loud. You will find yourself coming on too strong.

There is the fucked-up trifecta of divorce loneliness: guilt, abandonment and ashamed. 

There is gut-wrenching, isolating, surprisingly angry loneliness of the bereaved.

There is the loneliness of hating your body. 

There is the loneliness of loving your body and wanting to share it.

There is the loneliness of being old.

There is the loneliness of the adolescent.

There is no kind of loneliness that is free from shame.  
           

For most of my life I have wanted more time alone, not less.

Some of my happiest memories are of being inside child-sized hiding spaces: a view of white-blue summer sky from inside a nest of tall grass, the sound of my breath echoing inside a recycled tractor tire on my elementary school playground, the wood- and wool- scent of my grandmother’s spare clothing closet. On my first day of kindergarten, I forbade my parents to come back and walk me home, preferring to go by myself. When I was in high school, one of my favorite things to do was house sit because I loved having an entire house to myself.

Getting married at 19 meant that I skipped having any time as an adult living alone, whether by choice or not, which meant that its importance took on new urgency. A day at home with no one around or a night alone in a hotel were two of my purest pleasures, and from the time my kids were small, I found ways to get time without them—whether by handing them off to their father for a morning or a day or sending them to their grandparents for weeks-long visits. Even though I often spent that time missing them or worrying about them didn’t ruin the pleasure of being in a quiet place without anybody around. When my youngest left for college, I grieved her loss and that of her older brother as though I had lost a piece of myself, but the empty house was a solace, not a cause.

Feeling lonely was something that happened in the company of others, like not knowing the insider group at work, or being the only person with a small child in a group of twenty-something friends, or being the only one in a group that has read a certain kind of book or watched a certain kind of show. It wasn’t so much loneliness as being embarrassed to be alone.  Even in the most difficult and challenging days of my two marriages, I didn’t feel lonely—even suffering with someone is company. 

Then, my children were grown and my marriage was done and I had, for the first time in my life, a house of my own and even then being alone wasn’t lonely. Being alone was awesome. I had all the time that I wanted to do all the things I hadn’t had time to do and no one’s opinion to care about. I could watch whatever I wanted and eat whatever I wanted and go to bed when I felt like it and turn on the light and read when I woke up in the middle of the night. I could go to bed with whom I wanted, too, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone’s expectations about this unless it suited me to care. I could do a good or bad job at repairing something in my house, according to my own priorities, and I didn’t have to go to anyone else’s required events but my own. I had all the space I wanted for my clothes. I could think about all the things I think about without getting interrupted.  I missed my kids, sometimes, but I wasn’t lonely about them—I was glad that I wasn’t going to be an emotional burden.

 I adored the silence of living alone, and when I craved a complement to the silence, there was music and podcasts.  I would binge on my various kinds of happy aloneness all weekend long, parceling out small amounts of time with friends more carefully than I did dollars. I sobered up from my person-less weekends reluctantly on Monday mornings on my way into work and hurried home to my aloneness like a lover at day’s end.  At night, I sank into the very center of my big-hearted bed in my very own bedroom under the eaves of my house-shaped house with a heart full of gratitude for this precise luxury of personal space and time that I had never had, not once, at any other point in my life. The part of me that had been hungry for time alone had been empty for so long that I was certain it would never be filled up.

And then came the pandemic.

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Woman on the Verge

Doodle Dispatches is SBB’s resident artist and saves us all, every week, from the dreaded Wall of Text. You can see her work on Twitter and Instagram, as well as order all kinds of fun prints and gifts at DoodleDispatches.com

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