Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

Loneliness if often exacerbated by a perception that one is lonely while everyone else is connected. It's exaggerated by a sensation of being outside something that others seem to be in on: a family, a couple, a friendship, a joke. Perhaps now we can learn how flawed that kind of thinking is, because loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel.

Perhaps we see loneliness in others simply to feel less lonely ourselves.

Lonely people tend to scoop out larger spaces of isolation to burrow into by cutting themselves off from others - triggering the self-fulfilling prophecy of preventing rejection by avoiding opportunities for connection. Bonds are weakened, contact is reduced, loneliness fissures outward.

Loneliness feels to me like being underwater, fumbling against a muted world in which the sound of your own body is loud against the quiet of everything else. The simple gestures you enacted so easily on the ground become laborious, pushing against a weight no body is built to move through.

Or the times I've watched the people I love so unsatisfied, clawing toward connection that surpasses what I'm able to give them.

The more I've watched companionless strangers, the more I've come to think that these moments are only lonely for those who are observing them.

But loneliness isn’t necessarily tied to whether you have a partner or a best friend or an aspirational active social life in which you’re laughing all the time. It’s a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationships you want. Loneliness lives in the gap.

To arm ourselves is the most extreme form of separation I can imagine. To move through life without weapons is another way to remain open to the world, and at its mercy.

Strangers invade the monasteries of our minds.

I am only alone when I think I am

Stories are how we draw ourselves closer to one another and how we remember, and sometimes how we reshape.

If we no longer feel tethered to the communities our species was molded into needing, the act of posting a selfie or a carefully edited portrait of our banal domestic lives could just be a muted form of personal rescue. Is display a form of dilution, or is the broadcast part of what makes it real?

The red dirt lit by neon seems like evidence both that the end is near and that we might just live forever.

THE MAN HAS NEVER COOKED A CHICKEN BEFORE, HE TELLS SOPHIE, BUT IT'S HIS FIRST CHRISTMAS SINCE HIS WIFE DIED, SO HE THINKS IT'S BEST HE LEARN.

By now it's clear that waves of cultural nostalgia are so often geared toward reclaiming what never quite existed.

The problem isn't so much in the time one spends alone, but in how one feels about that aloneness

Bootstrap-pulling, frontier conquering, make-it-on-our-own ideologies are at the foundation of what's been coined "American.

Which is to say: of course I am still lonely. I've come to see it as an inevitably rather than an indictment, a condition that will continue to go in and out of remission in ways I can never reliably track. Romantic comedy logic provides love as an antidote for loneliness - or, really, love as an antidote for everything. But we know that love is rarely unbounded or infallibly accessible. There's no lever to pull when we want to draw it closer, and to rely on other people for a cure is to ignore the expanse between free will and obligation. No one person can create a drip-line of availability and understanding into another.