What is it that we desire to see in ourselves, years after all the effort we exert to become better people, or at least, people more well aware of their shortcomings, and thus more capable of navigating them with minimal damage to those around them? Do we look at our parents and think, this is where they went wrong, and I’ll never be like them, but we only end up being faulty people in other ways that we’ve failed to anticipate? or do we look at those who we think are better, and somehow try to discern their road to improvement, only to find ourselves on a different road entirely? Who can truly tell? It does seem like there’s no one way, or some others may say that there’s no road at all.
Is it that life has never been easy, or is it that we make life more difficult for ourselves? The answer probably is that there’s an element of truth to each of those ideas. Every day a new door to awareness opens, and with it questions and anxieties that come cascading down the waterfall of our thoughts, and with age the boulders just become bigger and much less avoidable. But I also reject the idea that being a good person is somehow a challenge, or an exercise in difficulty, I refuse to think that decency is some sort of test that most people fail somehow.
People love to point to the concept that if there was no oversight, everyone would revel in mischief, and those who wouldn’t would become sheep amongst wolves, destined for consumption. And perhaps examples in everyday life do corroborate that idea; witnessing corruption take over entire establishments and countries, and people following suit. How can you not think that we are inherently awful?
But I would say that said awfulness is not inherent, but indeed learned through years of cruelty and laissez-faire attitudes that warp people’s minds into thinking that it is an eat-or-be-eaten world out there. It is not difficult to be decent, but it is equally easy to teach a child that taking things by force is the only right road, that women are inferior, that you always have the right of way, regardless of what you’re doing. When you live in a cruel uncaring world, reflecting that cruelty back at the world becomes a means of survival, without any consideration of what lies beyond that cruelty. Had there been an inkling of a desire for introspection, I do not doubt that one might realize that they wish to be decent, or at least not as cruel as the world made them to be. They just never get to choose.
Choice is indeed a luxury, and maybe what we ought to do is try to give everyone the choice we possess. What comes out of that might be a surprise, to us and — more importantly — to them.
The memory seems to be seared into my mind for some reason. It was back in 2010, and I was working on my master’s in Saudi Arabia. Those two years were some of the loneliest in my life; I was living by myself for the very first time, and I had not managed to grow out of my extremely introverted shell – one wonders if I ever did, to be honest – at the time. So, while other students hung out in lounges and cafes and did nothing of consequence, I sat at home on my couch, watching TV and talking to people online. At the time, my platform of choice – aside from the then ever-present and entirely chaotic Twitter – was one of those chat websites. You know the type; chat rooms, organized by interest, full of anonymous people saying the most random things. I’d been on similar websites before, during my undergraduate years, but I’d stopped for some reason. At that point though, Twitter had grown into a familiar thing, a link to the friends and people back home, and I needed something different. So there I was, jumping back into those sparse windows filled with unfettered thoughts. I won’t pretend that it wasn’t utterly disgusting at times; I mean, I know that, and you probably do as well. That’s just the nature of the beast. But, joining the room dedicated towards those in their early twenties, there was definitely an element of shared disillusionment that brought everyone together, as people talked about their days, their struggles with school or with their partners, and of course, flirted endlessly with one another.
But I’m getting sidetracked here; during those chats, you could choose to send a private message to someone, if you wanted to talk to them in a less chaotic environment. (and yes, of course A/S/L messages were ubiquitous at the time). I don’t recall how it exactly happened, but I remember starting to talk to this girl who was older than I was at the time. I think she was perhaps 26 or 27, and I was entirely taken by her. In an environment that lent itself to usage of shorthand and internet speak, someone who wrote full sentences and used punctuation was someone you noticed, you know? And this girl could write. She wove those incredible stories about her life, about the people she knew, and the experiences she had, the countries she’d visited, the music she wrote, and you couldn’t help but get swept up in it all. I mean, for someone to want to tell you all these things, it was something I just appreciated immensely. It didn’t even come to mind that she could be making all of those things up. She could’ve even been a guy who was having some fun at my expense, but none of those thoughts came to me. It just seemed so entirely unlikely that someone was taking all of this time to let you know about them, and even more incredibly, learn more about you and provide their opinion and thoughts on the struggles you were going through. It would be a massive waste of time, not to mention impossibly boring, to troll someone through listening to him complain about family troubles, or how he was struggling with his studies.
Anyway, of course I fell for her; a pretty girl who seemed so worldly and yet so interested in what I had to say? I stood no chance whatsoever. Even more strangely, she seemed to be into me too, expressing her feelings in a very honest and open manner that would take years for me to experience again from anyone else. We talked for hours, thinking about the ways we could possibly meet up, and the places we’d go and the things we would do. I knew it was all very silly, but…come on, I was a lovesick 22 year old. I was invested.
Then one day, of course, she just vanished. Offline on MSN Messenger. Offline in that chat room. I’d gotten used to finding her online every day, so the sudden disappearance was immediately worrisome. Unfortunately, I had no one to reach out to in order to know more; she didn’t talk much to other people in that chat room, we had no common friends, and all I had to go with was a first name. Google would’ve laughed at me if it could. Initially I thought it was something I’d done or said, so I kept looking back at our last messages, trying to find an angle from which my words would’ve seemed offensive, but my efforts utterly failed. And after a week or so of frantically logging into those online services at various hours of the day, I was convinced that she was gone forever.
I usually forget about this girl for months or even years on end, but sometimes when I’m just sitting, I recall that there was this very brief period of time when this very peculiar stranger just appeared in my life, and promptly disappeared shortly afterwards, without a trace. And every time, I wonder what she could be doing right now. I wonder if something had happened, or if she’d just had to move on with her life. Maybe she moved out and lost her internet connection for a while. Maybe she met someone and forgot about all that nonsense.
Or maybe she never existed, someone’s bored pastime that had turned boring in its own right.
But whatever it might be, I hope that she – in whatever form she might truly take – is okay.
As far back as I remember, there used to be this silly thing that I was accustomed to doing when I was feeling particularly sad. I would think to myself, ‘if I disappeared, or had never existed, would the lives of those around me be any different?’ The answer invariably was a resounding no. Maybe my parents would experience a different sort of life, but I was incapable of seeing how my presence had in any way impacted the lives of friends and acquaintances that I had known at the time.
I know, pretty dark stuff for a kid, but for some reason, it’s where my mind often went. I’ve always been prone to loneliness; a sentiment that could be triggered by the smallest of reasons. Being ignored by friends at school, a weekend spent not talking to anyone, a girl I liked showing no interest in me; the list was endless. Sometimes it didn’t even need a reason to arise, I’d just be sitting there, and it would hit me, a tidal wave of solitude that drenches me in sadness. I would get over it, of course. I always did. But eventually it just became a part of who I am.
—
I turn thirty in a couple of months, and despite my many attempts to not think of it as anything but another number, the expectations associated with the mere adjustment of the tens digit in a tiny number loom rather large. I can already see several of my friends reading this and rolling their eyes in exasperation. Oh, you have no idea how wrong you are, I can hear them say, and I completely agree; I look at people making a big deal of turning 20 or 25, and I chuckle in the same knowing way. It’s just hard to see it from someone else’s perspective, I get it, it’s fine.
But the fact is, I’m turning thirty, and I’ve never felt lonelier in my life. It’s a hard thing to admit, because you think that during all those years, you’d have accrued a certain amount of connections that would make you feel part of something. So when you feel lonely, it comes associated with a feeling of failure, because you haven’t managed to cultivate those connections, and here you are, at a point where it feels too late, too hopeless to try to change that.
There are friends who will read the aforementioned and feel upset or hurt. I would hope that they wouldn’t feel that way, because they know that I do care about them a great deal and appreciate them immensely. And I know they care too. But, life’s funny like that; my group of close friends are now each in a different country, or caught up in the many obligations that come with being married with kids. I don’t begrudge them any of that; it’s just the way things go, that’s just life, etc. But I also won’t deny that it feels rather terrible to think about it and feel like you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the way, and here you are on your own. When you go days or weeks without anyone checking up on you, it’s hard not to feel a little sad.
I’ve felt some version of this for a year or two now, but it seems like the rapidly approaching three-oh wanted to kick the feeling into high gear. Egypt is doing its damndest to seem like the worst place to be, and one’s attempts at living in denial keep gradually getting eroded in the face of daily disappointments. Every month brings with it another friend packing their bags and shuffling off to seek something different. And you just find yourself wondering, what am I doing? Is it the right thing? Am I just wasting my time here? What do I want? Would leaving bring me happiness, or would I just go experience loneliness in a new place? you start feeling resentful, and then you feel guilty about feeling that way. The thoughts just keep swirling in your mind, without a clear answer, and the possibility of entering a new decade of your life without that clear answer brings with it yet another feeling of failure. The failure of loneliness, and the failure of ennui, mixed up with a not insignificant amount of anxiety, tangle together into a rubberband ball of very bad feelings that don’t go away.
Perhaps you’ll look at this and think it’s a problem of perspective. But when you’re feeling lonely, and the future is unclear, and you think you shouldn’t be feeling that way when you’re turning thirty, the lens through which you see life gets rather distorted, and things get rough. Even the things that you usually manage to say to others to help them through their own rough spots ring hollow in your ears, because your brain tells you it’s all bullshit, and you’re just trying to lie your way out of it. Gonna have to try harder than that, buddy.I know all the tricks.
I struggled a lot with saying all these things. It sounds incredibly whiny, I thought. Your pride gets in the way, because you don’t want to seem so vulnerable and weak. Nobody wants others to think they’re feeling purposeless and lost. But, what the hell, I said, if I’m feeling a certain way, I’ll just say it. I can’t both feel the lack of human connection and deny myself the right to express it. That’s just too cruel, and there’s enough cruelty in the world without inflicting it upon ourselves.
—
By some sheer coincidence, I found myself going through a fair bit of media lately that deals with loneliness. Be it reading Bluets by Maggie Nelson and seeing her experience loneliness through the lens of her fascination with the color blue, or listening to Moses Sumney’s Aromanticism (which I’m listening to as I write this actually) and experiencing the various struggles that come with accepting loneliness and living with it.
But perhaps the most affective of them has been The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, a book that I haven’t even finished yet, but which has already managed to leave its indelible mark upon me. In it, Laing talks about her own feelings of loneliness when she uprooted her life in England and moved to New York for a lover who ended up having second thoughts, and then she utilizes those feelings as a jumping off point to talk about various artists such as Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol, and how their loneliness made itself apparent in their lives and works of art.
And for me, there is a note of hope there; sure, perhaps loneliness isn’t something that’ll eventually go away. Maybe it is, as I said in the beginning, has become part of who I am. But perhaps that’s not all bad. Maybe you learn to get through the tough parts of it, and maybe it helps you gain a deeper knowledge of yourself and thus express yourself better. Maybe you manage to establish some sort of working arrangement, an understanding of sorts. Maybe, in time, it stops being such a fucking drag.
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