Si if I Never Feel Alone Again So I Drive Myself to a Friend

Lonely people take a natural affinity for the net. It'southward always there waiting, patient, flexible, suitable for every mood. But there are times when the cyberspace reminds me of the definition of a bore past Meyer the hairy economist, best friend of Travis McGee: "You know what a bore is, Travis. Someone who deprives you of solitude without providing yous with companionship."

What do lonely people want? Companionship. Beloved. Recognition. Entertainment. Camaraderie. Distraction.

Encouragement. Change. Feedback. Someone once said the fundamental reason we get married is because accept 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 to the lowest degree not to feel -- alone.

Yous are there in the interstices of the spider web. I sense you. I know some of you. I accept read more than than 78,000 comments on this weblog, and many of them take been from you. I know two readers who if possible would never get out their homes. I know more who cannot hands go out, considering of illness or responsibilities. I don't know of any agoraphobics, but there probably are some. Just considering you lot're agape to go exterior doesn't mean y'all're happy being inside.

On a weblog people confess and reveal. Some don't sign their names, merely what does a name hateful on the internet anyway? They write to me, they write to each other, they link to blogs, and I read. They experience stranded within themselves. Some can't observe romantic partners to interest them. Some have lost a great love and experience they volition never dear again. Others say they have a lot of sexual practice but still feel empty. Some fearfulness no one volition e'er exist interested in them.

Reading these comments, looking through these blogs, I sometimes experience like Miss Lonelyhearts. That's the hero of Nathanael West'due south novel about a man who is given the job of writing a newspaper communication column nether a pseudonym. Every twenty-four hours he receives letters from those in demand, and has no help to offering them. He feels he would accept to exist Jesus to perform his job. He is powerless over the pain and loneliness in his own life.

I'm non setting myself above the fray. I'k correct here in the middle, reading comments as if listening in on a national party line (I feel a slight dislocation when I realize how few of you lot have ever listened in on a political party line, or fifty-fifty know what one is). There are comments hither are on all sorts of things: Politics, literature, movies, fine art, health, God, the universe. Most of the comments are useful and literate, and many are elegantly written. "The best comments yous are likely to find anywhere on the web," I've heard information technology said.

But why are y'all writing them? Don't y'all accept anything else to practise? Every mean solar day there are untold millions of comments, texts, and online interactions. Millions. And each 1 says, I am here and I extend my consciousness to there. There might have been a time when humans were content to sit and simply be, like the goat I saw yesterday sitting contently in a patch of sunshine at the Lincoln Park Zoo. That fourth dimension was long agone. Nosotros want the news. We want to churr and gossip. We want to say "I am live" in a billion billion different ways. And now here is cyberspace, providing such an easy, easy fashion to exercise that.

When I was a child the mailman came in one case a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe information technology was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we employ our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes downwards to two minds crying out from their confinement.

The biological reason we autumn in beloved may be to encourage reproduction. Even so why did nature provide homosexuality if that is the only purpose? Why do people ally with no prospects of children? Babies are not the merely thing two people can create together. They can create a safe private world. They tin create a reality that affirms their values. They can stand for something. They can notice someone to laugh with, and confide in. Someone to hold them when they need to be held. A danger of the internet would be if we begin to run into those needs without feeling in that location has to be another person in the room.

I speak now nearly those who accept a pick. Some people reading this don't have a pick. One woman who posted wonderful comments later revealed she was almost completely paralyzed. I think of her often, and call back of her as reading. Others accept disabling diseases. You already know how I'm screwed up. So, you go on with it, and you practice what you tin. The internet is a godsend.

But that doesn't depict most of you, who are lonely for what might exist a matrix of psychological, social and situational reasons. I don't know you and can't explain you lot. I have no advice to offer. I'chiliad assuming y'all are indeed lonely, just not medically depressed. Depression can be treated with medications and therapy. It also might help to find something -- anything -- to do that you tin feel is useful.

But back to loneliness. I accept to reveal a truth about myself: I've never felt particularly solitary. I was an only child. I came from a happy, stable home. The school motorbus dropped me off at iii, and my parents weren't dwelling until after five, simply those two hours lone were treasure to me. I was a curious niggling boy. I always had something going.

If I yearned for something in those early on years, it was a delicious yearning by proxy. I listened to the radio. I found how nostalgic I was for Old Cape Cod, how much I missed Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, oh my darling. The notes of "Twilight Time" to this moment get in tardily sunset on a chilly autumn afternoon, and I am on the floor caressing my dog and feeling nosotros are together...at last...at twilight time. Just it must be the instrumental version by The Three Suns.

When I spent a twelvemonth in Cape Town, one-half a world away from anybody and everything I knew, I wasn't solitary for a moment. I was enveloped in the pleasure of exile. I've ever enjoyed fiction about exile; give me a novel that starts with someone alone in a room in a foreign metropolis, and I perk up. I identify with the pregnant given to "nostalgia" by Tarkovsky, which in one Russian sense means a longing for one's domicile so sweetness and sharp one might almost exit home in order to feel it.

I've never understood this bittersweet narcissism inside myself. I love to wander solitary streets in unknown cities. To find a cafe and order a coffee and recollect to myself -- here I am, known to no i, drinking my coffee and reading my newspaper. To sit down somewhere just barely out of the rain, and declare that my fortress. I retrieve of myself in the third person: Who is he? What is his mystery? I have explained before how I'm attracted to anonymous formica restaurants where I can read my book and look forrard to rice pudding for desert. To leave that warm place and enter the dark metropolis is a strange pleasure. Nostalgia perchance.

For many years I was an alcoholic, and I never felt alone then. I could feel sick, I could experience despair, but I could never feel alone. A drink would lift me up. I was never a morose drunk. Alcohol makes you feel better and then makes you lot feel worse and and so remorselessly very bad indeed, but then alcohol will make yous feel better again. It is the cure for the canis familiaris that bit you, and how hands you forget it is also the dog. Good Doctor Schlichter told me, "It is the one human relationship y'all take learned to count on, with the bottle."

Thank God I found sobriety. I could sustain myself with my work, my reading, the movies, my friends. And walking, walking, walking. Of all the purposes of teaching, I think the almost useful is this: It prepares y'all to keep yourself entertained. It gives you lot a better chance of an interesting job. Those who stare at the Goggle box for hours might every bit well be sitting on a stone nether a tree in a primeval village; indeed, that might offering more interest and variety. I can't recall the terminal fourth dimension I felt bored. I can't eat, potable or talk, and yet I accept so many other resources to keep myself entertained. I retrieve I must be a instance written report.

For nearly 20 years I have been happily married to Chaz, and earlier that there were other kind women in my life. Just I don't believe I ever dated to fight off loneliness. I thought of myself as self-contained. I was one-end shopping. I was happy i summer to hire a motorcar and drive lonely from the Lake District up through Scotland, finding my style from 1 bed and breakfast to another. I e'er had a proficient book going, I sketched, I talked to strangers, I wandered, but not lonely as a deject.

A few weeks ago, something happened. Chaz needed emergency surgery. There were two nights when I was alone and she was in the hospital, simply every bit there were months when she was solitary and I was in the hospital. And in the centre of the nighttime a great fright enveloped me. If "annihilation happened" (as they say), I would be so terribly, terribly alone, and deplorable. I would miss her then much. This feeling came over me in a wave. I pulled the covers tighter around me. Then I would know what loneliness was.

An illumination came into my mind, and with it the words of a song that has haunted me: Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what yous've got, till it'due south gone? Perhaps I wasn't lonely before because I didn't take information technology, so it couldn't be gone.The piddling comic nigh the egg was establish on Toothpaste for Dinner, which has many more. Chaz is feeling great, thanks. Information technology was her appendix.