Becoming Alone

You are an unexceptional student in the seventh grade. The teacher seldom calls on you for the answer because she knows you seldom have it. If your scholastic mediocrity is a foretelling of your future success, then your potential for anything higher than middle class is slight. It’s also doubtful you will advance much farther than a high school diploma as a community college degree or graduation from a four-year university will be both academically and financially beyond your reach.

Your parents are blue-collar members of society. Your father is lead custodian in a large manufacturing plant and your mother is a CNA in a long-term care center. Together they make enough money to put food on the table and a roof over your head but not enough to afford newer cars or out-of-state summer vacations. Your clothes aren’t unfashionable, but neither are they new and contemporary because they come from thrift stores. The furniture in your home comes from Facebook Marketplace, an upgrade from Craigslist and the Salvation Army. Grocery couponing is a way of life.

You are shy and uncomfortable around strangers, but even around friends you are withdrawn. Your parents and teachers aren’t concerned because they believe you were born an introvert, but the reality is you haven’t found the security needed to embrace your authentic self and you may never discover anything close to it.

With the opposite sex you are intrigued but guarded, more afraid of rejection than you are of death itself. Your reticence in romance, even at this juvenile stage of awakening affection, quietly brands you by peers of having a wandering eye to the same sex. If and until you ever marry, this characterization will become a hauntingly accurate and lingering identifier even in the innocent pursuit of deep and enduring friendships. Attraction to the opposite sex will have to wait until you find the courage to be self-defined.

You are a good listener because no one listens to you. You have opinions about many things but your views cannot conjure the curiosity needed in others to ask you even simple questions. Your circle of friends assumes your sentiments lack weight because you convey nothing of what an intellectual should exhibit.

In a world where excelling gets noticed and doing less is unremarkable, you walk away with nothing to show for desire or effort. You participate in the world around you not with the passion that comes from active endeavors but with the envy bred from silent observation. The stage, court, field, and track invite all but exclude most. You choose the sideline since that’s where you’ve come to accept where you belong.

Loneliness is the defining characteristic of your existence. The state of being alone is all you know and it has nothing in common with the beneficial aspects of intermittent solitude. Destitution of desired social connections, the lack of meaningful relationships, the constant feeling of being secluded, the despair from being emotionally isolated, and the pain that comes from being ignored make up for you what you comprehend to be the customary life.

Whatever philosophy of life you espouse will be kept closeted for lack of interest from anyone. You have no one with whom you can reveal anything about what your life is all about. There is no one to whom you can turn who will take even a moment to try and understand what it means to be you. Even if you find true friends can they be trusted to safeguard what you show them, or will they decide befriending you was a mistake given the seemingly bottomless well of hurts you’ve cataloged for years?

Looking ahead, your high school career is more complex but not less discomforting. The pool of potential friendships has increased without a corollary increase in probability. You likely find a cohort of companions with whom you can share the air, but even in the midst of this camaraderie you can’t shake the grip of feeling alone. The actuality is that loneliness is your only constant comrade.

Your adult life is an exponential expansion of possibility on all fronts. Released from most of your past, you are free to explore a fuller life, one connected socially and emotionally to others who may have more than a passing interest in your wellbeing. Yet, even if you finally find success with inclusion, and you are no longer secluded or separate, loneliness doesn’t dissipate to a level that can’t be registered. Can you ever be free of that state of being alone that distinguished so much of your earlier life?

In the case of actor Brad Pitt, the answer may be no. With a dose of honesty uncommon for Hollywood, Pitt admitted that I’ve always felt very alone in my life, alone growing up as a kid, alone even here. (GQ/June 22, 2022) Conceivably surrounded by everything this world could offer in terms of material and relational wealth, Pitt feels isolated and disconnected from this very same world.

Loneliness in the midst of such abundance is possible when Pitt’s pain inside is too great to uncover and the relationships around him are too shallow to support any reveal. Surrounded by endless opportunities to bond with other men, Pitt can’t get any farther than the familiar aloneness with which he’s grown accustomed. Furthermore, loneliness gains momentum by feeding on itself. Disconnection begets more disconnection. It’s not long before aloneness becomes the norm and meaningful association with others becomes so rare that it seems illusory even for someone like Brad Pitt.

In your prime your life will be in maintenance mode. You may be so preoccupied with busyness that you’ll hardly be aware of how little you are plugged in to other people and how little you know about those who know your first name. You’ll certainly be grateful for the friends you’ve acquired, and you may even think your station in life is unique if you can count more friends than they have.

Candidly, all this hustle and bustle marking the middle volume of your years is misleading. You may be thirty on your way to sixty but you’re still in seventh grade. Little has changed since you missed the cut, weren’t chosen, were overlooked, were set aside. Those tiny seeds of separation and isolation sewn decades before have rooted deeply in your adult life even though feeling alone doesn’t feel so lonely anymore. You’ve accepted it so you can cope; and now that you can cope, loneliness isn’t really so bad. You’ve been free to choose anything you ever wanted without having to wrestle with preconditions from someone else. You’ve journeyed through life unencumbered by relationships that can be tiresome or problematic or even enviable. Through it all you’ve had the chance to spend time on yourself without worrying if you spent too much.

I know something of the detached life that awaits you. It’s easy to feel alone when no one around you relates to what your life’s path has meant. You’ll learn soon enough that few people will ever inquire about what’s going on in your mind. If they take the time to delve it almost always will be at a superficial level with the goal of moving on to something else as quickly as possible. If someone does happen to listen and says I understand, you can do what I do. I check them off and make a mental note not to go farther than I’m fine the next time they ask.

Becoming alone is a lifelong process that is nearly invisible but never irrelevant. You’re too young to see its long-term dynamics let alone ponder its immediate effects upon your psyche and emotional growth. For now, it’s best to live day by day with the hope this predicted outcome will prove to be a mirage. Yet if none of this is an illusion and it comes to pass by and by, then you will have lived and survived in the obscure truth that a forest of trees can never know. The solitary tree, exposed as it is to the vastness of the open sky and country and all they command, stands to be the strongest, lives to be the longest, and grows to be the grandest.

There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him. He was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care. Isaiah 53 NLT