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.