A Personal Essay on Loneliness

One of the better "get-to-know-you" questions out there is asking someone "what are your pet peeves?"  I love GTKY questions, and this one is great for a couple of reasons.  First off, it tells you something about someone else, likely that you didn't know before, and can help to modulate your behavior around them (if they hate incessant tapping, for example, you know to avoid it).  Second, it reveals a lot about someone else's personality-if they are someone that can come up with 6-7 out-the-bat, this is someone who knows themselves, and knows what they want out of life.  And third, and most important in a GTKY question, it shows creativity.  If your example is "people who are mean to wait staff," you're cheating, and don't get the question (we all hate people who are mean to wait staff, even if we don't practice what we preach)-a pet peeve is meant to be something that is unique to you, or at least a subset of people.

My go-to answer for this question is "I hate when people don't have an opinion on where we're eating."  As someone who is driven insane by this, I'll point out it happens a LOT more than you'd think, particularly when you're friends with a Type A person (which I am) whom you're used to planning your outings.  Frequently people might exercise veto power for a restaurant, but oftentimes when I ask "what do you want to eat?" the response is some version of "I don't know-what do you want?" which, even if I don't say something (because I love my friends & family), will always bug me internally.  It's to the point where I've actively said on my birthday "I will not celebrate it if I have to pick the restaurant-the greatest gift you can give me is telling me where we're going to eat."

While doing some self-reflections in the past two weeks, I came to the conclusion that this might be the most telling aspect of me as I wade through my thirties, a journey I've been doing for long enough that I'm not sharing the exact number of my age.  As someone who is single in their thirties, I can speak to a lot of things I like better about my life than I did in my twenties.  I am more confident in myself, particularly my financial situation (knock on wood), and who I am as a person.  I know what I want out of life, even if I don't always get it, and I know when I bring something of value to a conversation.  While self-doubt & anxiety & ridiculous worry never entirely go away (we all have moments where we wonder if any of our friends actually like us or if we're actually talented at the thing we love to do), it gets easier, and thank god because that was exhausting in my twenties.

But the thing I wasn't prepared for when I turned 30, something that would've filled me with dread had I known, was how much I would have to rely upon myself for everything as I got older.  Media has done a better job of normalizing being single & celebrating life choices that don't involve marriage, babies, & a house in the suburbs, but lost in that is assuming that being single, especially when you've moved beyond the bar-hopping, bed-hopping glamorous phases of your twenties and are largely a creature of habit, is easy.  It's not.  All life choices come with their own burdens, but I don't think we recognize that being single as you get older, particularly if you live alone, is hard.

While I have loving friends & family, especially for the small things in my life, I have to rely upon me only.  There is a patch of dead grass in my lawn that no one but me is going to reseed.  I haven't had someone else fold my laundry since I was 19.  I have to coordinate my own rides to the airport when I travel, and I have to run every errand in my life.  When we think of support as a collective, we think of it as providing love & guidance, but honestly...there are days when I would love nothing more than for someone to unload my dishwasher without asking.

We think of being single, truly single (not divorced or widowed) as a choice, but it's not exactly a choice.  I've dated for most of my adult life, pretty consistently.  I have had more conversations about other people's siblings over a plate of under-salted pasta than I can count.  I didn't plan on being single at this age & quite frankly I didn't want to be, and when you have to deal with the minutia of everyday life, that can become a lot to bear.  Feeling like you're isolated, especially during a global pandemic where so much of our human interactions are a fraction of what they were three years ago, is really lonely.  In the past couple of months, as I've felt particularly lost & unable to do the things I used to love to do (that would get me through until I felt like my life had a path), particularly in a world where everyone else seems too busy to reach out without asking, that's been really hard to do in a way it didn't used to be.  Every mowed lawn, every scrubbed floor, every bucket list item or new exercise routine...it just feels lonelier & lonelier when you don't have someone to share it with, when it doesn't feel like anyone is paying attention to where your life is headed.

I don't know why I'm saying this on this blog.  But I know that I can't be the only person who sometimes feels like they're on an island, and if you are feeling this way, especially if you're single, know I see and am very proud of how you carry your weight alone.  I have a very nice life.  I'm very privileged in that I own my own home & (again, knock on wood) I don't have to worry about where my next paycheck is coming from.  But I do think that in the past three years while we've moved onto a new way-of-existence, we've come to a place where people being out-of-sight truly feels like they're out-of-mind, and I sometimes feel that in a world where we're constantly online & constantly anxious & constantly self-focused that we've forgotten how to connect, and how important connection is, and how it's something that can't always come from one person, no matter how much you're used to them being the planner or being the one who reaches out first.  

This might be the reason I love when other people pick the restaurant I'm going to eat at-because it's one of the only times where it feels like someone else is helping with the day-to-day of my life, a burden that I usually don't mind carrying, but in a world where it feels like loneliness is frequent & inevitable, is one that it feels good to have relief in carrying.