HerKind.com

Sometimes there's really no cure for loneliness except more solitude. Other times the cure is to connect, face to face, or at least voice to voice with a kind-hearted loved one, or a like-minded new friend. Or go for a long walk in nature.

Those sentences aren't meant to sound like platitudes. I find them to be true, for me at least.

The state of loneliness, or even the odd afternoon of feeling lonely, isn't a popular topic to discuss. I think people pretty much shy away from declaring loneliness as their frame of mind. I know from experience that admitting you're lonely can clear a room. I recently read a blog post discussing a new book called The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century by psychiatrist team Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz. The book apparently discusses why people have fewer trusted connections now, in the age of hyper connectivity, than in the last few decades. The blog post talked about how lonely people are often social misfits and how social isolation is a health risk. I hear this alot, especially around Christmas and it always kind of scares me.

I spend most of my time alone, at least 75%. Some of it is deliberate. But not all.

I also spend quite a bit of time feeling lonely. Sometimes it's overwhelming, other times it's useful. Solitude is good for the soul, but too much of it is not recommended. It's a delicate balance. Either way, I have learned to push through loneliness. I know now what it's based on.

I never once felt lonely until the day my mother died at the end of 1997. At the time, I was just learning about how much solitude I needed but never once equated that need or practice with loneliness. After my mom left the world, I was utterly bereft and have never really recovered. This is because, try as I did to replace the friendship and kinship I had with her, I finally had to face the fact that it couldn't be done. She was my preferred company, my best friend, the one person with whom a single conversation offered me the gifts of comfort, intellectual sympatico and stimulation and just plain fun. We shared many common outlooks and ideas about life and how to live it. We had an extremely strong connection and I still believe that even if I was not born of her womb, we would have found each other in the world.

Feeling this way does not mean I haven't moved on with my life, cultivated strong friendships and continued to be a social animal. This does mean that my particular brand of loneliness is not easily "cured" (for lack of a better word). It only means I have learned to live with it and am still learning not to react impulsively because of it.

After my mom died, I realized almost immediately that I had a different, newer, more intense need for my friends than ever before. I was perhaps a bit hard on them for not meeting this need to my specifications. At the time, in our late 30s most of our careers were on an upward movement, many of us were settling into serious coupledom, marriage, kids. I could never see enough of my pals and because I felt I never saw them, and my best friend was gone, why not move away and start fresh in a part of the country that I perceived had a more balanced approach to life.

It worked for a time in the sense that a change is as good as a rest. But slowly, the loneliness crept back in. Just like a Vancouver cabbie once said to me "the rush is in you, not the city you live in," it's also true that loneliness does follow you. Living there, taking a stroll along the seawall could sometimes alleviate the feeling. Montains, ocean. Living here, I often feel stuck. But I've learned this is also something immovable living inside me. Toronto doesn't inspire movement in me. Vancouver does. A true inner struggle that I'm still working out.

Working at home I spend a lot of time talking to people electronically - email, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter. I can spend days in a row without hearing the sound of my own voice, and yet I have "talked" to quite a few people. It counts, and it doesn't count. You can feel all talked out before you even get to any real connection. I enjoy it, but there are times when I just have to tune out the noise of e-connection for real live human interaction. The truth is, the voice, the eyes and the body have it. Nothing can ever replace the soothing touch of a compassionate friend, the synchronized laughter of a shared joke, or that certain knowing look during a conversation.

As for lonely people being anti-social, or socially anxious. That's a strong denial of the denial of loneliness in our culture. One really has not a lot to do with the other. I can spend days and weeks alone, and then walk into a party or gathering perfectly alone and not have a problem. Maybe not everyone who spends as much time alone as I do can do that, but to paint any segment of the population with one brush is most annoying. Especially when it's the social culture itself that is contributing to the feeling of isolation.

I guess I just think that loneliness is a fairly misunderstood state of mind. And before we take it out to examine whether or not it needs to be medicalized (the next step I'm sure), we should spend some time trying to understand its source. I think we'll find that it is highly individual, and fairly common.