Where Do Our Feelings of "Aloneness" Come From?

Sometimes I just sit here and consider my sporadic sense of aloneness. Not to be confused with loneliness, it's that feeling of being an alien on Earth... or an Earthling on an alien planet somewhere.

It's not about loneliness, it's more about just feeling a sense of non-belonging.

Sometimes I just sit in those feelings of that aloneness, usually accompanied by music... because music somehow brings me closer to "something?" And so I sit there and sometimes it feels like I am sending the music out into the world like it's a signal.

Connection is an interesting experience. Sometimes we miss somebody terribly... even when they're gone, and yet we feel that if we just concentrate hard enough we can still reach them somehow. And sometimes that feeling of being able to reach them somehow is perhaps more a feeling of sending the message "out there" in the hopes that maybe there's a "someone" else who hears them.

A long time ago I attended a number of creative writing workshops, and one of the things we had to do for several exercises was learn to "write from the heart."

For the most part, this was an exercise both in self discovery as well as in self honesty.

Let's face it, most of us live behind a wall of self-editing that determines the public persona we turn out to the world.

Typically, our public personas are a reflection of the version of ourselves we feel it is safe to put out in the world. At least that holds true for me, because one of my orientations towards how I "strategize" my existence is seeking safety.
This is neither a good or a bad strategy, it is simply a strategy.

Often I sit quietly with these little collections of songs/melodies/tunes I've heard that somehow make me feel both like I'm closer to something, while also feeling like there are message hidden in the music.

Do I sound like a crazy person? That's always a risk we run, when doing a "write from the heart" exercise!

Let me pause to re-emphasize that I'm not really lonely!

That's the wrong way of looking at it. Loneliness is a whole different thing. Aloneness is a reflection of being somewhere and feeling somehow disconnected; recognizing that we are unique. Copies do not exist! The disconnection doesn't have anything to do with large crowds of people or family or anything like that, it has to do with a sense of connection to things that may never actually have existed in our world but perhaps we've wished for them to exist.

It's a sort of crazy thing that has been a part of my daily life since probably my early teenage years. I remember sitting in my small room in our house in the south of Spain looking out at the little bit of the mountains I could see through the palm tree fronds in front of my window and reaching out into the world. The search for extraterrestrial life? Maybe just the search for a familiar signal rather than an ocean of static and unfamiliar sense signals.

Human minds can be very strange places!

I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg on my portable radio. If you grew up in Europe a few decades ago there was a very famous "pirate radio" station that broadcast in English during the nights and into the early morning hours. What was so interesting about it was that the occasional requests for songs that came in were from all over Europe and even Soviet Russia. And people were asking to play a song for somebody who lived thousands of miles away.

The thing about aloneness is that you live inside it and you feel like the answer is always there around the corner just out of reach but no matter how fast you walk and how far you go it always remains just around the corner just out of reach.

The strange thing is that the feeling often persists even if you are in an primarily happy relationship with someone, or you're very close to members of your family, or have near and dear friends. It's hard to explain... harder for people to understand.

And so, the "signals" we send go to reaching that tiny tiny number of people who also felt like they were left behind and left out.

But every now and then these tendrils of energy we send touch somebody else and maybe — just for a moment and maybe for a minute and maybe for the rest of our lives — we suddenly feel just a little bit less lost.

It's not something you can find readily, and it's not something you can place an ad in the paper for. It happens unexpectedly when it does... and it can disappear just as unexpectedly.

Perhaps it is a reflection of the fact that all we ultimately want — regardless of what our age might be, what our gender is, what our nationality is, heck what planet we come from — is just a moment of authentic connection; a moment where that sense of aloneness is suddenly suspended and we genuinely feel like we are at one with something else.

Someone I knew a very long time ago once told me that of everyone she had ever met, I was the one most comfortable with being in a perpetual state of sadness. I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond at the time, so I smiled slightly and nodded.

Most of the time, life actually is precisely as it is supposed to be! Even when we live with a backdrop of aloneness...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

How about you? Have you ever felt very conscious of a sense of aloneness? Does it, or did it, trouble you? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.05.31 00:30 PDT
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