Remedying Loneliness & Self

REMEDYING

WORDS Carly Roberts VISUALS Mariely Torres STYLING/MAKEUP Serino Nakayama, Olivia Cigliano MODEL Amaya Segundo BTS Fay Ishac

& SELF LONELINESS

Often, as a kid, I returned from long wandering days with bloody knees or the swipe from a hidden, rusted barbed-wire fence on my hand. I loved being alone as a girl; in my rural Virginian home I spent hours wandering creeks and pulling honeysuckle in the backwoods behind my childhood home. Nothing has given me a greater sense of independence since then, since I was able to move freely, without fear, through the farmland I grew up on—the only consequence to my aloneness was a tumble or a scrape. I know I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t had that sense of freedom—to roam, to be. It was just me, against the backdrop of what then felt like the entire world, until one day, I just stopped moving out into the spaces around me. Some time well into my adolescence, I stopped seeking that kind of solitude. It stopped being appealing, it stopped feeling freeing. Everything I was concerned with had to do with my friends, my family, and my crushes. The idea of sitting alone on the schoolbus or in the cafeteria was fear-inducing, the most embarrassing, and dreaded thing. It is only recently that I have begun to enjoy sitting in a cafe alone, taking solitary drives, and eating a meal by myself at a restaurant. We often see the peopling and unpeopling of our worlds as a metric for growth. But to defıne ourselves and our growth in the revolving door of relationships that defıne and populate our lives is just too simple—aloneness is the most radically personal thing that we have. It is the most necessary balm. It is something we have the tools for always; it is also, almost always hard. There is never a time that aloneness or loneliness isn’t complicated, isn’t part of a

The most beautiful part of your body & remember, loneliness is still time spent Ocean Vuong with the world is where it’s headed.

larger context, a broader tapestry of life experiences. My friends and I recently sat down together on Valentine’s Day for dinner, each of us without a partner, each of us making sarcastic quips at one point about it. As we sat and shared our appetizers we discussed Jo March’s monologue in Gerwig’s Little Women, the scene that we all agreed had the most emotional magnitude through the fılm, when she says, “...I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fıt for. I’m so sick of it. But—I’m so lonely.” We agreed it articulated something we had all felt before, but hadn’t found the language to fully articulate. This past summer, for the fırst time in my life, I felt that being alone was indulgent. But indulgent in a bad way, in a selfısh way, and while certain days I was able to hold off that feeling in my hot Allston apartment, the languor of late afternoons stuck to the scuffed wood floors, and I would prance around in shorts or in my underwear feeling content, other days I couldn’t hold that feeling off. I had communicated a boundary to a partner—space. And so, on days when I got the space I had asked for, I got hot and sweaty from the stove as I cooked dinner only for myself, and ate it alone, resting on my bed with the fan hitting my skin, cooling it—no matter how long that old feeling—

the feeling of utter contentment and joy of just being with myself I experienced for so long—washed over me, I soon felt pangs of guilt for my aloneness and even more guilt at feeling happy for being alone. I had a partner who loved me—why did I fınd joy and relief in his absence? Since the end of that era of my life, I have come back to a loneliness that I had forgotten. I began binge-watching Sex and the City and watched the show in its entirety in these past few months—I watched the show from start to fınish, through Big and Steve and Aidan, and I even watched the fırst Sex and the City movie. In so many ways, the show hasn’t aged well, but it still holds tight to its emotional centers of sex, loneliness, romance, love, single womanhood, and aging. The show celebrates the joys of being single, but also all of love’s aches and disappointments. But beyond Sex and the City’s longevity, the world of a show that interrogates single womanhood and aloneness feels offcenter at times: no matter how many times the girls have their hearts broken, there are always more partners, more people to date, in fact, infınite people in the island of Manhattan, infınite potentials of soul mates, infınite meet-cutes. The reality is that, for most of us, there isn’t an infınity of potential soul mates,

potential friends. The string of people who come into our lives and alter them, disrupt them, imbue them, isn’t as successive as we would like to think. If you peel back the layers of influence from enemies, friends, lovers, family members, soul mates of any kind, there is still, always, the core of self that remains for each of us. I had forgotten this, until I had seen it so plainly, and felt it so acutely. I’m now so aware of how much of our discourse, our daily thoughts, our conversations with friends are about the peopling of our lives. Having and experiencing solitude is a rare thing. I’ve been returning to something the poet Ocean Vuong said: “the most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. / & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.” It feels so radical to claim that the body carries us toward something better. I’ve embraced the idea that loneliness, that distinctive grief is borne of being alone, is still time spent with the world. Sometimes it is easy to feel content in my bedroom, by myself, and sometimes I have to remind and even convince myself that there can be joy in loneliness and aloneness. I have always only been able to return to myself in the quiet hours when I am alone. And sometimes returning to yourself is painful and hard, in breakups especially. There’s a saying: “when you’re feeling lonely, it is a sign that you are craving yourself”—when I am lonely, I feel like I’m losing myself in craving other people, or, more deeply, craving myself and not necessarily other people. That urge to be with myself and reconnect to myself was something I felt that summer—I felt lonely within a relationship, a relationship that was defıned by an intense closeness, yet I often felt lonely throughout my days, even when he was with me—the relationship with myself was offcenter. My days were fılled with a certain degree of tension after months of long-distance, only relieved when we reunited. You can’t tap into that core, can’t cultivate yourself or your sense of self unless you are alone, oftentimes painfully so. You can’t process whatever you’re

going through without sitting with yourself. The self you are when you’re with others is completely different than the self you are when you’re alone. More and more, there is growing emphasis placed on achieving self-love, on achieving a degree of selfreliance that can maybe only come from decades of self-actualization and wisdom. People celebrate fıerceness when it comes to independence, and this celebration is radical. The emphasis we now place on independence and self-love is radical, yet there are emotional consequences and weights to being fıercely alone. And self-love is an achievement over a lifetime. It creates, I think, discrepancies in the ways we have begun to think about our relationship with ourselves and with others. So I call on the words of Audre Lorde: “That selfconnection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”