Are you lonely? If so, how do you compensate for your loneliness?
I’ll tell you how I do it, and for many people, this won’t seem at all like compensation. On the contrary, it will appear to be quite benign. It seemed that way to me too, until very recently, and now I can look back on my life recognizing the many other more obvious methods along the way I created a false sense of, well, anti-loneliness.
Lunch is just the latest incarnation of the many ways I have distracted myself over the years.
No promises, yet I will do my best not to bore you with all the old stories. In fact, I’ll tell only one, maybe two ways this antidote to loneliness manifests for me.
I go out to lunch, a lot.
Sometimes I go to lunch because I want to connect with my friends. Other times I go to lunch because there is nothing better to do. Still other times I go to lunch because it is less demanding than a dinner or a walk when someone commands my presence, and it’s definitely less demanding than simply sitting down for a nice chat with no other accoutrements. Tea is also a really good way to distract or compensate for loneliness. Other than that, there are always movies and you know there isn’t much real connection happening during a movie which may actually be preferred in some instances.
So when a movie just won’t do, and in lieu of tea, I choose lunch. It’s fairly short. Choosing, eating and conversing about food is one of the main components of lunch so it takes up a little time and takes the edge off. Besides, there is a nice table between me and my lunch date serving to protect me from whatever might come in between us. A dramatic story, a dumping of emotional energy, a complaint, whatever, the table buffers all that.
Have you figured out yet that loneliness might just be something we, or I anyway, hold dear? Why would I take the time to meet with someone that might just dump or place something dangerous in between us, so much so that a table is a necessary barrier? Why would I choose to spend time with a person like that?
Loneliness.
For now, that’s all I can say. If you get “real” with yourself, maybe you too will see just how not-particular you are when you are lonely. Anyone will do, eh?! In the old days, my ex-husband used to say that a 2 (ugly girl) at 10 pm in a bar turned into a 10 (pretty and sexy) at 2 pm in that verysame place. Yes, I know that sounds incredibly misogynistic and rude, yet at some level, when we are lonely, we play the same kind of game.
Someone we don’t really like as well as another friend will do in a pinch when the other is not available. I think it’s safe to say we all have tiers of friends, both inner and outer circles. In fact, I bet it’s safe to say that we have people in our lives that we are afraid to dismiss because we need backup. What’s the risk? What, really, is at stake here?
I used to believe I was just too nice to slowly pull away from someone and remember oh how painful it was to say, I’m just not interested in hanging with you right now, or anymore. Nowadays, I can be heard telling people that I can no longer tolerate their mundane world attachments, their starstruck conversations and inane discussions of family vacations, superficial politics and cosmetic surgery. It honestly drives me crazy! I’m on a one-way train track going to Bohemia, on a starship that never plans to return to our galaxy, moving back into the time of Socrates, even Cheslav Milosh, Dante or Henry Miller.
You can always find me in the smoky Jazz joint hidden in the alleyway. No one is mundane in the no name bar! And although there are many people drinking alone, no one seems to be very lonely in there.
Then, I go off to see a movie with another more like-able friend. Hoping nobody sees us, we sneak into “Sex in the City” or “Devil Wears Prada” avoiding being construed as posers. Notice that I didn’t say misconstrued. Like everyone else in the world we can carry off the facade of intellect and consciousness, philosophizing away when all we really want to do is watch a stupid movie and laugh together so we aren’t lonely anymore.
Some of that is a really big exaggeration! And, some of it is true at some moment in time. After all, how many minutes each week can we hold the space to be conscientious and conscious of everything that happens around us?
For me, I actually want to be conscious as close to 100 percent as I can get on any particular day, or in any moment. That’s why so many people have been written-off of my going for a quiet walk or having an intimate chat over tea list. And because I am so damned intense and oftentimes dismissive, I have been written-off too. Honestly, I can barely stand to see one lame movie a year and the only reason I like girly movies like “Sex in the City” is to look at the fashion; the shoes, purses and coats. It’s such a creative machine this thing we call fashion, and women for millenia have adorned themselves in one way or another with fashionable dresses, hair styles, make-up and more.
To me, that level of creativity and archetypal symbolism is at the core of our cross-cultural oneness and women are the ones who carry it all through eternity as though it was timeless. To deny it, makes me feel really lonely inside. It’s as though the barking male dog barring his teeth overpowers our female creativity, sucking the soft feminine pastels out of the sky. No longer do we see the orbs, floating and playing, weaving their part of the Yin-Yang tapestry each day.
Loneliness is really more a distraction from our true selves or at least a denial that certain parts of us exist and certain parts of everyone exist inside us. Like the mid-westerner who moves to Manhattan or San Francisco, we can only blend in so much before our flat vowel pronunciation gives us away. It only takes a moment to notice that we are wearing our grandmother’s clothes or that our knee high nylons show between the blue skin of their tight tops and the hemlines of those ugly plaid skirts. We are all mid-westerners, aren’t we? We are all in some way, just like the next guy, the girls walking around in curlers smacking gum or even the guy with the camera, black socks, loafers and Bermuda shorts.
Aren’t we both or all?
I am most lonely, when I am not looking loudly up at the sky, embracing my inner mid-westerner; that’s when I feel different, disconnected and not really part of the world in which I chose to live long ago that day on the threshold juxtaposed between spirit, soul and body.
And I’d really like to stop going out to lunch; at least for the reasons that support me in avoiding myself or pretending that I have lots of friends and money, that I am a fashionable woman, or a San Franciscan when I was really born in Buffalo. It all feels so incredibly pretentious; so very, very lonely. Jung would shudder, I think. He might also wonder why, with all the intelligence, education and self-realization, I’d not yet found the way to re-discovering what I hid from myself all those years ago.
