Hi, I'm Harris Lapiroff.

It’s nearly summer now and the world is exposed and beautiful, green and sunny, throwing itself at my feet, yet I have been thinking about loneliness.

I’ve been thinking about loneliness because I have been lonely. I live in a place where my life used to overflow with friendship. But this was college and my friends have, bit by bit, moved on. I still have local friends–I don’t pretend that I don’t, but they have shrunk to a small handful. I can count on one hand the ones who make me feel loved in the way that I want to be loved. This is fair and to be expected. This is where I chose to live and this is the experience I knew that I would have if I did so. My eyes were open when I stayed in Oberlin. Still, the transition has been. Difficult.

I’ve been thinking about how destructive loneliness can be, how it can be a cycle. I’ve seen lonely people who are desperate for attention, who lash out when they feel abandoned, who drive themselves further into isolation. I’ve seen this, in small ways, in myself. I’ve seen how loneliness can be a peg on which people hang up their ambitions for another day. I’ve seen them become sad and reclusive, hard-shelled and unwilling to try the things that might make them happy, for fear of failure or maybe fear of something else. Again, I’ve seen this in myself.

What scares me is how easy it is to react this way to loneliness, to make loneliness from loneliness, when the opposite reaction is the more productive: to put myself out there, to be vulnerable, to pay attention to what people need from me and offer it gently, to be conscious of when I am overstepping my boundaries and step back when necessary, to neither force myself on others nor hide from them. To work to be a person who others want to be around. More than that, to work to be a person who is good for others to be around. This is something I have been working on.

I’ve been thinking about loneliness as circumstance, as something that can be accepted and leaned into when necessary rather than fought against. How can I take this extra time that I have for myself and turn it into something productive. Self-work, reading, projects, art, charity, and ambition can all flourish in isolation. If it must be that I spend less time socializing, perhaps that time can be put to good use. This, also, is something I have been working on.

And I’ve been thinking about how to turn loneliness into solitude. How to take loneliness, which causes self-doubt, and turn it into self-love: solitary drawn-out baths, meditation, long walks in the rain, nights spent reading a book with a pot of tea. There is so much love in me, waiting to be given to others who step up to receive it, but probably there is also love for myself and in the absence of others on long lonely days and evenings, I can discover it.

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Roger Ebert, All the Lonely People:

What do lonely people desire? Companionship. Love. Recognition. Entertainment. Camaraderie. Distraction.

Encouragement. Change. Feedback. Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because have a universal human need for a witness. All of these are possibilities. But what all lonely people share is a desire not to be – or at least not to feel – alone.

bell hooks, All About Love:

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

and, bell hooks quoting Henri Nouwen:

“The difficult road is the road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into fruitful solitude.”

Adrienne Rich:

Song

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

How To Be Alone:

Eugene O’Neill:

Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.

David Whyte, House of Belonging:

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.