Isolation and Solitude

It’s a shame that more people don’t walk in L.A. It’s too bad that the convenience of speeding from one location to the next outweighs the therapeutic effects of a casual stroll down Wilshire.

It’s dusk and as I shuffle along the sidewalk, only glancing up at every third car horn, I notice that I’ve already passed five cars in the span of 20 steps. I’m counting. They haven’t moved. I have. I shift my eyes to the right and study the face of a businessman mouthing angry words into his Bluetooth headset. Fancy car, fancy man. Everything about him is clean in a way that is uncomfortable and, moreover, unhealthy.

It looks like he’s washed and pressed his shirt a thousand times before donning it, a pristine disguise meant to conceal his very human flaws.

I wonder how many times he scrubbed his hands at the sink before leaving the office, purging himself of the germs he no doubt contracted from one handshake after the next.. Human interaction, washed down the drain.

Do his kids run out to greet him when he gets home, I wonder?

A large sedan tries to merge in front of his car. Red light. No one is moving, and yet the man in the pressed shirt inches forward to prove a point. Do not pass. Every man for himself and damn the rest.

Isolation. I know nothing about this man, can only judge him based on this quick snapshot of his life. It’s not his best moment. I momentarily catch his eye, and I quickly pretend as though I’m looking through his window at a point just beyond his head. Behind my sunglasses, I close my eyes quickly in a silent apology.

It’s wrong to stare.

I continue on my walk down Wilshire, and I’m all too aware that I’m the only one out on the barren L.A. sidewalk. It’s too much. The smell of car fumes finally gives way to the overwhelming scent of pines as I make a quick left to start the steep ascent up a hilly residential street.

Escape.

People say they need therapy to figure out what’s wrong with them, what other people have that they don’t. Money. Happiness. Sanity. Time. They want a quick fix, a diagnosis and a pat on the back and reassurance that everything will be okay – they don’t have time to dig deeper toward the root of the problem, nor do they want to admit that their dissatisfaction might stem from a problem within themselves.

Generally speaking, people are always in pursuit of a kind of simplicity they claim to have achieved at some point in their lives. The reality, though, is that this simplicity still resides within them, and always will.

But it takes a certain kind of calm to find it again. The kind of calm they can only find in solitude, but never in isolation.

Walk it out.

The Sum of All Fears

Confession: I have never before felt so lonely in my life.

I am antsy, discontent, tired. I can’t focus on the projects set before me, and I feel as though I am filling my time with useless things in anticipation for something that’ll never come.

I am caught in the middle of too many things, and yet feel as though I’m teetering on the brink of everything, of a very vast something.

I know what my goals are, but can’t bring myself to take steps toward them. Call it self-doubt, call it hesitation, call it self-fulfilled prophecy. Something in me just doesn’t want to reach that end goal, doesn’t want me to feel the thrill of accomplishment.

I’m keeping myself down.

It’s a strange state of mind, I’ll admit. I haven’t felt this uncertain about my own abilities and emotions in a long time, and sometimes I really question just why that is. The only conclusion I’ve been able to come up with is that I am, in very plain terms, growing up.

And I know I’m not the only one.

Loneliness is a curious thing. By definition, it should be a solitary state of mind, something that makes a person feel alone in a crowded street, in the pulse and flow of the world’s heartbeat. But this is far from the case. Lately I feel as though my feeling lonely actually connects me to strangers in a way that feeling content never could – maybe this is the reason why I am drawn to the emotion.

I just started my internship this past week, and am experiencing 40-hour workweeks for the first time in my life. Talk about dynamic workplaces. The office that I sit in every day is filled with staffers and editors constantly scrambling to meet deadlines, rushing to make meetings, tossing memos and comments back and forth about incoming news stories. But the weird thing is that I have never before looked into so many faces and seen loneliness reflected back at me.

Is this a part of growing up that people neglected to tell me about?

In an industry that, on the surface, relies so heavily on human interaction and communication, I find it mind-boggling that so many journalists appear to have built barriers around themselves over the years. They seem jaded, tired, cynical. It worries me that these veteran reporters and writers seem downright miserable doing their job, and look for any excuse not to work. Loneliness seems like a journalistic requirement, on the checklist somewhere between “interviewing skills” and “writing ability.” Maybe I’m being naïve, but at what point did learning and writing and educating become a chore? I know that being a journalist isn’t all fun and games, but should I expect to have my spirit weighed down like theirs sometime in the near future?

Society tells us that with maturity comes independence, but independence isn’t really about freedom; it’s really about the newfound freedom to pick and choose who and what we rely on. It’s strange, because even though people say they want to be free from restrictions, being completely alone is in itself a form of vulnerability, and most of the time, people end up running back toward the safety net of dependency. Independence and dependence are more interwoven than it would initially seem, but at the same time, there’s no real way to consolidate the two – by definition, you can’t be a little bit of each.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is because settling into a new phase of life always leaves me feeling somewhat unsettled (the irony of it all), and I’m finally starting to pinpoint two of the main causes for my uneasy state of mind: fear and need.

Whenever I hop into a new part of my life, I always have to reassess myself before I can fully adjust. A lot of the reflecting I’ve been doing lately ties itself back to fears and needs – my fears in starting this new chapter of my life, my fear of being on my own, my need to feel needed, my fear of failure. What I’ve discovered, though, is that when you get right down to it, fear is nothing more than the result of not living in the now. By this I mean that fears are founded on a person’s inability to take his or her mind off either the past or the future (or both).

And when I look at the situation that way, it seems obvious to me what the remedy is: live for the now. It’s just that simple, and it’s just that difficult.

Living a life governed by fear is confining, and perhaps this is where the barriers and the loneliness come in. I think too many people, myself included, live life tiptoe-ing around their fears. People live their lives day-to-day distracting themselves from the negatives in life – some by drinking themselves into oblivion, others by chasing fleeting, materialistic things, still others by putting off problems. Generally speaking, people don’t like to feel anger, loneliness, depression, fear…the “lows” of life.

It’s easier to find distractions than to take our fears head-on.

Consequently, we become so careful with life that we really just stop living – and because we’ve blocked ourselves from feeling the lows, we can’t really feel the highs either.

We become numb.

And then the true loneliness sets in – better to feel alone and feel something, to find empathy and compassion that way than to feel nothing at all. Being alone is something everyone sympathizes with, because we’ve all been there. It’s a part of growing up, and it’s a state of mind that connects us all, ironically enough.

So when I say that I’ve been feeling lonely lately, I don’t mean that I want to work myself out of this state of mind. What I really mean to say is that I’m glad I’m experiencing a low now, at this point in my life, so that when something great happens, I’ll be able to appreciate that high.

What goes up must come down, but what falls down doesn’t necessary spring back up. It all depends on the foundation you’ve made for yourself and the durability of your character.

I’m hoping I’ll bounce back.