Detachment Issues

Over the years, I really thought that I had familiarized myself with the concept of “alone versus lonely.” It's like one of those sad, vibey songs that replays in my head on a loop. I've always understood “alone” to be a state of physical being; alone meant being by yourself sans other people. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a mental state. Therefore, one can be alone without being lonely, because “lonely” is a way of thinking, not of being. Make sense? Great. When I was around 13 years old, I decided to be alone. I knew that I had to be. In order to explain how I reached that conclusion, I have to tell you a bit of background information...

I have always had friends. I was very shy, always a little out of place, and slightly awkward; but people always found their way to me eventually. I was lucky that way, I guess. However, when I moved to a new state and transferred schools as a kid, I found myself even more out of place than usual. I was even bullied — verbally, not physically. It's important to me that I mention that I was very willing to fight if necessary, despite the shyness (but that's neither here nor there). Nonetheless, I made friends even in that situation. Be that as it may, only one of those friends was truly important to me in the end. I think it would be fair to call her my best friend. She’s who I would call every single day and every time I had any news. We both transferred schools at the same time. I attended for three years but she had been there for about six.

My bf was a social butterfly, super cool and pretty and I, simply, was not. I was just a quiet kid who was uninterested in boys, or physical looks, or adult things and my social skills were minimal at best. I made lots of friends at the other schools I went on to attend (two middle schools then a different high school), but at the end of the day, I felt like she was all I had. I could share everything with her and she was familiar with all my weirdness and quirks. I was not all she had, though. If she wanted, she could have had the world bowed at her feet, because she was just awesome. Every day I started to fear that when I would call, she would be busy and I would be alone — with no one to talk to, no one to advise me on big kid things, and no one to tell my troubles.

I felt like it was poisonous for me to be so dependent on one person. So one day I decided that I would only depend on myself from then on. I stopped being friends with my bf — I didn't call or text her anymore. No one knew why except for me, not even her. Honestly, I was prone to attitudes, so I assume she just thought that was the case. In short, I stopped speaking to her because I thought that one day she would have so many friends and she wouldn’t even think about me anymore; I mean, I already knew she didn't need me. So I had to prepare for that mentally. The intention was not to cut her off before she cut me off, though I can see why it might look that way. I just thought that she would be more than fine without me and I needed to figure out how to find company within myself before she was *poof* gone in the blink of an eye. Whether on not I was correct in my assessment of the situation, I obviously went about it wrong, in retrospect, but I was an angsty teen.

A decade later, and, up until recently, I believed that I had been alone ever since. Friends, though I loved them, were not permanent ideas to me because I believed I was incapable of permanence. So far, that part remains true. Friends come and go and I can’t bear to keep up with anyone because of this anxiety that I've built up around the idea of people leaving me. So I pretend that my world is a revolving door and people are meant to come and go — no matter who, no matter how long they’ve managed to stay. I prepare for people to eventually leave me, instead of making room for them to stay and I maintain my air of indifference.

Moreover, It's taken some time, but I have finally come to the realization that I ultimately failed in what my 13-year-old brain was attempting to do (go figure). Rather than being alone and refusing to rely on the company of others that is so often unavailable to me, I’ve become perpetually lonely. Even during those years that I spent surrounding myself with people, parties, and noise to drown out loneliness — it was to no avail. Now I know that I'm not the person who I've always considered myself to be. Instead, I'm the kind of person who is consistently lonely, whether or not I'm alone... and there’s no strength or peace in any of it. There’s only me.