Why I Am Eating An Entire Crumb Cake By Myself This Year

I read this quote in a Maggie Nelson poem the other day and it unearthed some words I’ve been meaning to write. Loneliness, to me, has always been a difficult emotion to admit to. It’s always felt almost…ungrateful. Or reserved for other people. Lonely? With that life? With those friends? I’ve often brushed it off. But earlier this summer, a wave of loneliness hit me with such force that I had no choice but to let it in.

I found myself alone staring out of the window on a plane, suddenly overcome with this heavy, sinking feeling that I was really just alone. I squeezed my eyes, willing the tears to stop their imminent arrival. God not here, on a plane!? I was thankful, for once, for the mask I had on. I was coming from friends and I was going home to people I love, yet I felt so deeply, achingly, lonely.

Calling my mom crying later only did so much (❤ you mom) because it was one of those emotions that felt unsolvable. And as I’m writing this I realized it felt like this Welsh word I saw once, “hiraeth”, which roughly translates to “a longing for a home you cannot return to, no longer exists, or never was”. Was this feeling about a home that no longer exists? In a way, yes. The world hasn’t felt the same to me since 2016 when my Grandma Jo passed away. The home she represented to me, the most comfortable place in the entire world, no longer exists. The world in which I was safe to build homes in other people no longer exists (a necessary part of my evolution but a painful one nonetheless). But also it’s about a home that never was — where people I love never leave and I can always pick up the phone to call them. This is just life, I recognize that. But god there’s an abject loneliness to really, viscerally accepting it.

I tried something different this time with loneliness. I felt it — the ache, the hollowness. I felt its flavor, its texture, and how it could somehow be both sharp and dull at the same time. And I talked about it. I told people close to me I was lonely. I ditched cool girl a while ago, but loneliness was a new emotion to wear out loud like this. And it really helped, to not hide it under my pillowcase, under busyness, or under the lie of answering the question of “how are you?” with “good!”.

It took a while for the loneliness to pass through me but it did, even as nothing on the outside really changed. And afterwards, unexpectedly, I felt SO much life inside of me. Even more than before. And therein is where I found the lesson, profound but simple —

Loneliness isn’t always something to be fixed.

Loneliness is an inherent texture of being alive.

It’s the occasional dark that necessarily contrasts those moments of light when you feel so in love with your life and the people in it.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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