Loneliness is not Solitude

Posted on July 7, 2005 in Psycho-bunk Rage & Annoyance

The insensitivity of optimists goads me to private passions. Most annoying among them are the Hallmark card customers who think that with a few pink flourishes and glittery stickers they can make everyone like them. Or better still they can just claim that everyone likes them. Which is a mechanism for putting people like me on the spot and clamping a bit over our mouths so we can’t express ourselves.

My mouth gaped when one of these amateur psychologists told another person that the way to alleviate feelings of loneliness was to reframe it as “solitude”. The optimist had no clue: Loneliness is the desire for the company of others when that company is not available. You can feel lonely in a crowd or in your room. It’s the body’s desire for another person near to it.

Solitude, on the other hand, calls for one to feel good about oneself when one is alone by choice. It’s the wondrous swish you feel when you climb a mountain by yourself and listen to the snow flurries coursing through the granite, the early morning walk on the beach. You can enjoy solitude but you also need people. Hermits went crazy when they had too much of it. Every monk I have known enjoys visitors.

You can no more call loneliness solitude than you can call hunger prayer.

Lance told me that he suspected that the person was using optimism as a way of not facing a few hard realities. Throw out a million slogans and you don’t have to face how meanspirited and thoughtless that you are. Of course, people like me attract the wrath of optimists (ironic that they should act in anger, but challenge them even in the slightest and they go for the jugular. You’ve undone their illusion: you must be discredit, eliminated. Or else they will have to leave.

I am learning to stand my ground and listen. To give good advice: there’s no denying the hurt. What matters is trying to assuage it. Denying it only leads us towards breakdown.

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Self-help slogans both disgust and fascinate me. The ones I hate seem calculated to tell us to shut up. Even good slogans — in the hands of a rampaging optimist — can operate to suppress our self-awareness and silence us when we attempt to speak of our pain. If we chant them too much to ourselves instead of doing real thinking, we kill our true spirit.

And that is what I struggle for, the soul that is Joel Sax.

I hope you struggle for yours, pilgrim.