Quickly Written About Loneliness

I just realized a factor in my life I've been denying. I don't want to deny anything. People around me count on me denying nothing, on being completely true. I also should be able to count on myself.

I get lonely. I feel lonely right now. It's not a new thing. My work environment has always felt lonely to me. The nature of the place and of my response to it leaves me with many hours aggregated across the day of non-interaction. I'm alone when in my cube, and I'm usually alone when in the lab. I attend very few meetings these days and most of those are online. I seek out solitude fairly often. I seek it out and then I feel lonely in it.

Why do I do that? A moment ago I realized the introvert within me asserts itself without my even recognizing it. A lot of people have no idea I'm such an introvert. Sunya knew me a year and a half before she started to believe it. This is because I'm pretty good at rising out of it when I want to. I'm not all that much of an introvert. But I need my away-from-people time all the same. I have a theory that since I live in a house full of people, some of them young and noisy, and just like everyone else there I have no single place all my own, a need for solitude builds up without my even realizing it. I satisfy this need while at work. That's easy to do because I was always that way. I developed introverted work habits a very long time ago.

I would posit this is because I spent a lot of time living in a house with people while married too. Of course they were my bosom family and offspring but I still needed time away. I think I needed significantly more then than I do now. I think I've grown, or changed anyway, and fit my current environment much better than I could have a few years ago. So while the environments are quite different, my response is about the same. I interact at home as much as I need to, as much as I think the people around me need me to, and if I don't get that solitude I apparently need, I'm okay with it, I just manage to get it while at work.

You can easily imagine this never did my career a lot of good. I never networked, I never found ways to work with people if I didn't have to, I never established myself as a broadly-based engineer with a good reputation, and I therefore never rose in the ranks. I stayed employed, and people outside the company count that an achievement. But I don't. I didn't fuck up very badly is all that means. And by now I don't really care any more than that anyway.

Is the loneliness severe? No. It goes away completely when I interact, even in just text, with a loved one, or really with anyone. I'm never lonely when with Sunya -- thankfully, as I've never wanted to suddenly see myself in that song by Gotye. It was a big hit when we met and given the intensity of our interest I sometimes wondered if it was prophetic, being as hot fires tend to burn out. But it was not prophetic. She nor I will never just be somebody that we used to know. We're partners in several meanings of the term. Which makes any sense of loneliness interesting, and in need of being understood.

Now and then I think of when we were together / Like when you said you felt so happy you could die / Told myself that you were right for me / But felt so lonely in your company / But that was love and it's an ache I still remember

Nope. Pretty well disproven after three years.

Well, as it happens, writing this endless letter to the future that is journaling and blogging also dispels loneliness. You are now in my consciousness, whoever you are, and I don't feel alone. When will I next? Perhaps while driving away from the office, but more likely not until sometime tomorrow, when I'm back in the office, an office thinned out by the looming holiday, and suddenly feeling disconnected again, and uncertain again of the value of any work. What to do about it? Don't know. What I do know is that feelings are best shared, and like any useful conversation or R&D, given air without any expected outcome.

Well, clearly the answer is not in surrounding myself with more people, or with new people. I think my style of loneliness is really the feeling of being less worthy that goes along with not spending my alone time quite as I know I should. Time alone is when real work gets done, but I still surrender all too readily to attention deficit if I fail to switch tasks effectively. So loneliness really isn't the problem. It's a symptom arising from various causes of dissatisfaction, and I do have plans in place, after a fashion, to address them.