In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Albert Camus
I love being alone.
Not all the time, but I do.
I’m a social creature—six planets in Gemini—and I need my friends. Humans require each other’s presence. Miss me with that grossly popular socially crippled bullshit about bed rotting every day and romanticizing avoiding human interaction.
No.
There is a difference between choosing occasional solitude and resigning oneself to an anti-social palliative flatness.
I elect to be alone two or three days a week.
I do not fear silence. I do not fear myself.
I know I always return to the world.
Remember what Byung Chul Han wrote: The divine is an event of stillness.
I need solitude to think, read, and write. I need solitude to process. It is in these moments of quiet that we realize, that we reckon with it All.
In solitude, we find the truth, which is likely why most people try to prevent it so diligently.
Loneliness is a void, a byproduct of how we live. We are aware that it can overtake us even in a room full of people, that it exists within marriages and friendships. People are lonely during sex. One can be known throughout the world and still be strangled by loneliness.
Loneliness is what happens when you fear solitude. Loneliness is a compulsion, a panic-stricken need to fill the vacant and unoccupied.
Years of celibacy have taught me much about Desire, what I truly long for. So much of my twenties were spent frantically trying to avoid myself, to find someone to fill the lacuna, the fucking pit of fear.
It never did work: the casual sex, the texts.
No one’s dick is going to save you.
Loneliness becomes an inevitable epidemic in a Capitalist society, where we spend our lives trying to remedy ourselves, trying to plug every hole.
We do not like to admit how much fear drives our behavior, our decisions, and our lives. Still, it is the undeniable root of our actions, and non-actions as well.
When I was waiting for the results of my mammogram back in April,
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