Hi world.

Happy Sunday. ❤

As my days of college come closer and closer to a close, I find myself thinking about how differently they feel now, on this day, than they ever have before. Something has changed, quietly and swiftly, without ever asking my permission. I have lost my loneliness.

That might sound paradoxically strange.

It is.

FEELING INVISIBLE

For most of college, I felt like a ghost. I spent long days on that campus, walking around in funky outfits with Sylvia Plath’s journals under one arm and class notes under the other, feeling no connection whatsoever to my drunken peers. It’s difficult to describe the sheer anonymity that came over me in those years. I felt utterly unseen, unheard, and unknown.

I remember one frigid December night, at the very end of one of my semesters, I left my apartment to attend the launch party of the student-run magazine I was being published in. I remember showing up and seeing my personal essay momentarily flashed on a big screen, the first time I ever saw my words, and my name, in print. I remember grabbing a copy and opening it up, at a loss for words at the realness of it all. The realness of seeing my name on that page, for it validated that I really was there, at that school, doing things, even if on most days I couldn’t be sure. Was I there, or wasn’t I?

You would be surprised how valid of a question that becomes when alone in a massive university, a grain of sand on a beach. The thought of graduating was always so jarring because how could I leave a place I felt that I had barely even been? It felt so impersonal, all of it.

FEELING SEEN

Yet then, by some strange act of this world, this semester changed all of that. Without trying, I have made more friends and acquaintances in the past few months than I have in the past few years. This massive school suddenly feels incredibly small. My long days on campus are almost overwhelmingly social. I can barely walk anywhere without running into someone from somewhere, pausing to catch up.

Which is what this is really all about. Those moments of speaking, out loud, to someone else.

What a seemingly mundane thing to focus on, I know. But hear me out. When you are so used to living inside of your own world, of spending so many hours silently thinking, reading, writing, speaking to another person becomes this extraordinarily real experience that forces you into the present moment.

I think of this quote from Patti Smith’s memoir, M-Train:

“My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others.”

– Patti Smith M-Train

When you’re an introspective person, you live your life traveling between two worlds: the world of your mind, the one you exist within when alone, and the world that is real to others, the one that you step inside of when you order a coffee or run into a friend on the street. In an instant, you are snapped out of introspection and into the real environment before you.

For years, I have gotten away with spending most of my time in my own world. The world that saved me as a kid and a teenager when the real world of others was not one that you could have paid me to participate in.

But now, I come home from a day on campus and realize that I spent most of it outside of myself, talking to people, running into old classmates, professors, and friends. My peer group is growing up, becoming more and more interesting to me. Suddenly, there are people my age who are quite brilliant and fascinating and fun. I actually want to be around them.

Which brings me to the the utter exposure of allowing yourself to exist to other people after years of shutting them out.

VULNERABILITY

In The Lonely City, a book devoted to the space between those two, aforementioned worlds of the self and others, Olivia Laing writes,

“In the throes of loneliness, with it’s pledge of connection, it’s beautiful, slippery promises of anonymity and control. [No] danger of being revealed or exposed, discovered wanting, seen in a state of need or lack.”

– Olivia Laing The Lonely City

She was talking about the internet here, but I think these words apply equally well to loneliness itself. It’s a safe, cozy room, but one without windows. No one can get inside. You don’t feel that your life is not being witnessed by anyone. You feel like a ghost. Which is complex and challenging, but comfortable. There’s no risk, no vulnerability. You only have yourself.

I realized the other day that at some point, I walked out of that room. I began meeting people. Now, suddenly, I feel seen and heard and known by all of these beautiful souls that I never allowed myself to believe could exist within that campus. I can’t walk to a class without running into someone. Even when secluded in some corner of campus with a book, reveling in the nostalgic solitude of my early college years, I’ll hear,

Makenna? Hi! How are you?

When did I possibly become so visible? And why does it feel so vulnerable?

Because it is. Because in having interest in this other person, you’re openly existing within a state of need and want. How humiliating modern society has turned the most basic human desire into. Connection. Friendship. Feeling like you, well, exist.

Which is great, but also a bit anxiety-ridden when you have friendship trauma and assume that anyone might turn on you at any moment. What I’m learning though, is that it’s about perspective.

A LOVELY PERSPECTIVE

I read something, somewhere, the other day where someone was explaining to their friend that they always worry that they are judging them or don’t like them. The friend responded by saying that it hurt that she would say something so mean about him. About him. Meaning, when we assume that others are judging us, we are assuming that they are not kind, authentic friends. We are punishing them for the actions of others.

That floored me.  

Often, I feel anxious after spending time with someone new, worrying about what I said or did or other random, irrational things that plague us all. But this changed how I understand that feeling. We feel that anxiety because people have, in the past, been less than ideal. They have betrayed us or been fake with us or any number of things. It’s natural to assume that others will also be this way, as a defense mechanism. 

It has never occurred to me that in doing this, in assuming that this person is secretly judging you, you are assuming that they are the kind of person to do so. You’re assuming that they’re being a fake, deceitful friend. Which isn’t just unfair to you, but really, to them.

It’s such an obvious truth, yet such a mind-altering one.

I thinks it’s so interesting that we tend to not take issue with mistreating ourselves, yet the thought of offending someone else is so alarming.

What if we could be that gentle and kind to ourselves?

Love, m.

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