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At various times over the past several months, I have struggled with intense feelings of loneliness. These feelings often appear alongside other feelings of despair or pointlessness. On the whole, my motivation for many things has appeared inconstant, and certainly unreliable.
I have the impression that, if you had asked me during October or November of last year if I often felt lonely, or if I considered myself a lonely person, I would have answered no; so what has changed?
At the end of September last year, I began a series of laser hair-reduction treatments on my face and neck. A great deal of reduction has become more and more obvious as time has passed, and accompanying this I have felt more and more at ease with my appearance. Since January of this year, I have felt really as though a new phase in my personhood had begun; or, perhaps more accurately, as though a new sub-phase in the larger phase of personhood which began when I came out to my family in late 2020, during the pandemic. I certainly feel more love for myself, and less despairing about my particular person. But I also seem to have become more sensitive as a result: I feel everything so much more richly than before, and I think that this development, however welcome in the abstract, has proven double-edged.
Although solitude and social difficulty may produce or exacerbate loneliness, nevertheless loneliness differs fundamentally from both of these things. I think of loneliness almost as a kind of injury: if you want to treat it, you have to stop irritating the wound; but you also have to treat the wound directly, if you would like to get better. Loneliness names a particular kind of ache.
A socially-capable person can have many friends and still suffer from loneliness; I believe that I fit this description. I fortunately have many friends with whom I have good relationships, and rarely feel inadequate to the social circumstances of my daily life. But while I spend time with people, even people with whom I feel particularly close, I can still feel painfully lonely, and at a considerable remove from some kind of central current in human life.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I have a crush on someone I know. Unfortunately, I believe that this crush has contributed substantially to my loneliness. For one thing, many years have passed since I felt that I wanted anyone so badly, and sometimes I think that I can have never before felt so infatuated with anyone. I daydream all the time about giving them kindness and care and affection. I think that the restoration of my ability more earnestly and easily to care about another person, brought on at least partly by my laser hair-reduction treatments, has also made clear to me how many years have elapsed since I could freely indulge in this very important part of myself, the part which cares and remembers and misses and loves.
It seems only natural that I must become rather uncomfortably well-acquainted with what I lack, if I want to lead a richer, more interesting, more ethical, and more loving life; and I do, I want this very desperately.
All this to say, I welcome this overall change in my person, and I certainly welcome the development of having a crush. I try to remind myself that, if things between myself my crush do not work out like I hope, even still it should gladden me to have perceived such powerful and immediate beauty in anyone --- and even to have had them look at me on occasion with such arresting affection that I felt every part of me become light and warm and peaceful.
I want more than anything to behave confidently and courageously, and not to become bogged down in fear and despair. It troubles me that so many of my personal heroes --- mostly literary and philosophical figures of various kinds --- suffered so terribly. I sometimes think that I would throw away all artistic and intellectual ambition, if only God could give me love instead.
For instance --- without going into too much detail --- when my crush sometimes travels or even simply goes off and does things alone, I become needlessly fearful as to their safety; so fearful, in fact, that I recently realized that, in practice, I really do imagine anywhere which I have not myself visited or otherwise known well as a kind of moral chaos, a place full of long shadows and wicked intentions. I may as well picture silhouettes of men with kitchen knives in their outstretched arms creeping up and down all the alleyways. How and when I became so acutely fearful, I could not tell you; although I would readily attribute a large part of it to being transgender, and on that account feeling unceasingly precarious and vulnerable --- and this, in spite of the fact that I almost always completely conceal my gender.
I mention all this because I feel that, somehow or other --- although the connection remains murky --- my loneliness and my fear have something to do with one another.
It certainly seems plausible that someone who remains lonely for too long soon learns to fear the future; and likewise, that someone who intensely fears a great deal can thereby encourage their alienation from the rest of the world.
The tone of these posts still strikes me as quite stiff. I do write in an intentionally stiff way, largely because I want to understand what it means to write clearly and honestly; and this task seems to become manageable to me only as I commit to rigid formality.
I spoke to my therapist the other day about my feelings of loneliness, and they seemed especially curious to understand which factors I could identify, if any, which I feel contribute to these feelings. Every factor which occurs to me, I can do very little about for the short-term foreseeable future. (Where I live, and with whom I live, for instance.) For now, I just want to find a way to mitigate them, and to remind myself of the many healthy connections with other people which I already have.