lost in translation

Loneliness is pernicious, a creeping sensation of discomfort, a casual reminder that you don't belong. It sweeps over you like a wave, crashing down on your confidence and your comfort. Friends fade into acquaintances fade into strangers, and your relationship with yourself atrophies away until you can't stand to look yourself in the mirror, can't stand to meet your own eyes.

Loneliness is being misunderstood—no one quite understands you, quite gets you. You are tired of translating your reality into a language others can understand. There's no interpreter to help you spin your truths into foreign words, and you have to figure out how to fit the mold that others have made for you all on your own. You are both teacher and student of pretending to be something you are not, someone alien. You contort yourself to match the mold, the template, and then maybe people will like you a little more. But they don't like you, they don't know you, and you feel alone, you feel lonely.

Loneliness is a physical twisting in your stomach, a physical weight in your chest pulling you down to the ground. It's a knife embedded in your stomach, and unfortunately you never learned first aid. It's feeling unwanted, feeling like a burden, feeling like you add something that others do not want. You are unnecessary, non-essential.

Humans are social creatures, wired for connection with other humans, and loneliness is a rat gnawing on the circuitry of social interaction. It chews through wires and opens emotional floodgates, and your heart yearns for a friend, a partner, anyone. Your heart yearns for someone who can understand you, for someone who speaks your language. Your heart yearns for someone who hasn't made a mold for you, for someone who accepts you as you are, who loves you as you are. Your heart yearns for laughter and community, your heart yearns to belong. Your heart is yearning and you are crying, and it doesn't matter whether you're in Times Square or some remote wilderness, because your loneliness engulfs you internally, your loneliness pays no heed to your surroundings.

Loneliness is not objective, it's something subjective, something personal. It's something that hides within you, it's the monster under your childhood bed that only you could see. It's a bitter enemy to human flourishing, it's a cruel specter that haunts you everywhere you go. It wraps its claws around your neck, suffocating you with inescapable sadness, with profound misery. It sinks its teeth into your skin and feeds off your insecurity, your doubts and fears. It rots you from the inside out, it kills your authenticity, your originality.

You try to reach out to others, but your pleas for help must have gotten lost in translation, because your hands are grasping at empty air. There's no one there to catch you during a trust fall exercise, and you tumble down to the ground, the air knocked out of you, the weight of loneliness dragging you down, down, down. Your heart is growing weary of yearning for something more, something better. You know there are two possible endings to the story—the happy one, where you find that person who speaks your language, where you find that acceptance, that love, that appreciation, that connection, and your loneliness dissipates to make room for happiness; or the other one, the one where your loneliness grows so expansive that it chokes you from the inside, and it fills your veins with a dark, oozing sadness, and your heart would prefer to stop beating than to live in loneliness.

You cross your fingers and hope that better endings lie ahead.