heard this poem today on a video posted by my favorite blogger of all time, rebecca woolf. i like it so much that i want to remember it by saving it here.
if you are at first lonely, be patient. if you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. you’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.
we can start with the acceptable places – the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library – where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much anyway, so it’s safe there.
there is also the gym. if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in. then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places. and there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.
start simple. things you may have previously avoided based on your ‘avoid being alone’ principles. the lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers, employees that only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone. resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
when you are comfortable with eat-lunch-and-run, take yourself out for dinner, a restaurant with linen and silverware. you’re no less intriguing a person when you are eating solo dessert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. in fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.
go to the movies where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community. and then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. and if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. the way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, gorgeous and affecting. dance until you’re sweating, and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. down your back, like a book of blessings.
go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there are always statues to talk to. and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches might have never happened had you not been there by yourself.
society is afraid of alone, though. like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.
you can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company. but no one is in your head. and by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept. perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from preschool over to high school groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay. ’cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.
it’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you. for this be relieved, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach. and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, the community is not present. just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. take silence and respect it.
if you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it. you could be in an instant surrounded if you need it. if your heart is bleeding, make the best of it. there is heat in freezing, be a testament.
-tanya davis
