Connections: A Lifetime Worth Pursuing

I still feel lonely at times.  After all, I’ve had decades of habits that kept me from living the life I want.  I have decades of cultivated mechanisms that have held me back.  I’m an expert in holding myself back.  It’s taking some time to break through many many many years of this.  So, of course there will be moments that I just feel lonely. So…

…Here I am racking my mind to figure out why it is I’m feel lonely, in spite of being more open and expressive than ever before. At one point in my life, I felt alone. To feel alone is to feel as though no one understands, no one can hear you, as if you are the only person on the earth who cares. I don’t feel that way anymore. Being more real with everyone in your life, family friends, co-workers, can really open you to others and bring others to you. I am not alone. And, though I am comfortable being alone, meaning I know how to feel power and connection through my actions and not the validation, admiration, or responses of others, I still feel lonely. Feeling lonely is not like the despair of feeling isolated, of some how standing too far out from the crowd or too lost in the crowd that you feel some how absent to your true self. No, feeling lonely is a longing for connection of a particular kind.

I have sometimes read existentialist philosophers make a distinction between fear and anxiety by arguing that “fear is always fear of something” whereas anxiety lacks this “of something.” There is no object of anxiety…it is a state of being. A condition. It is precisely anxiety because what is anxious is that there is nothing towards which to direct our feelings of concern. In anxious moments, we direct our concerns towards nothing, literally no-thing, and this is what is so anxious about anxiety. Fear on the other hand is very clear. We have a fear of something, there is an object toward which we can direct our concern.

Well, I seem to be feeling loneliness in a similar way. There is “feeling alone” which is the feeling of being alone as a state, a condition of being human. There is no object to direct my loneliness. We are always and forever alone in this world. One and only, I. Much of GetReal was reflecting on this basic being alone, coming to grips with it, accepting it and taking up its charge. Building a life around the basis of your ownmost “I.” It is my reality to create. This is all well and good. It is rooted in anxiety but in a very productive way, a creative way. I have no issues with being alone.

But, I’m not feeling alone. I’m feeling lonely. Loneliness has an object. It is about connection of a particular kind. And, while it is certainly the case that my own capacity and willingness to be expressive can provide me a feeling of connection, that feeling seems to speak more to being alone rather than the feeling of loneliness. Is this making sense? Lonely is rotten with desires. I want to connect with women. I can connect all well a good with friends, co-workers, family, but women that I find attractive, women that I desire, that speaks more to loneliness. This, in short, is loneliness with an object. To feel lonely is to know that I have desires at work. Feeling lonely speaks from my unconscious, bodily desires, out towards some object. Rooted in fear that loss of the object means more pain, feeling lonely seeks to reach out at all costs (including not being real and creating layers of bullshit in the hopes of just keeping that object (women) in your presence).

I have only gotten this far, however, in making sense of my feelings of loneliness. The core issue is that there is an object that I am making responsible for my feeling of connection. To feel lonely is to at the same time have an object toward which I am directing my attention. And that object is, of course, women I find attractive. I am making women responsible for my feelings of connection, in spite of feeling so less alone than ever before in my life. I do not feel alone. But I do feel lonely.

…that feeling “lonely” is a gift from my inner world, that inner champion that shouts to me that my life is in the work of changing. After all, I’ve made peace with being alone and that is the first step of being able to even feel “lonely,” to feel that there is some kind of connection that your body craves. For me that connection is of the female type…to feel deep, powerful, connections with women I desire.

I have accepted my loneliness and what it means about the life I want and desire, now what remains is to act to create a life where those feelings (with those women) become possible. How? Only one way: Turn it up to 11 and act…go out and connect…see what happens…adjust….repeat…And, all the while, taking my purpose and focus, directing them and my actions towards removing all the layers of bullshit that seek to stifle open expression of feelings in the moment. It’s not easy, but then again. I remember one professor saying: Anything worth doing cannot be accomplished in a single lifetime.

Being real is a life long journey…