Last fall I joined a major university research project on emotions. It was administered via an app that was already on my phone from attending an executive course at that university earlier in the year, so it was easy. For eight consecutive weeks that eventually extended to twelve, twice a day I rated the degree to which I felt a dozen or so primary emotions. It took some time, but I eventually noticed that while I could rate my emotions easily, when it came to loneliness, I was always emphatically insulted by the question. Lonely? Preposterous. I am never lonely. I can always entertain myself. I am constantly reading and researching. I learned to eat alone when my children were small. I have embraced aloneness, or craved it, my entire life.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Gertrude, Hamlet, Shakespeare
It would take a better part of a year for me to finally begin scratching the surface of this. Coincidentally (or not at all), the discovery of somatic exercises led me here.
“Mind if I come along?” he asked gently, as I have been quite sure in the past I did not want him to. “Why would you?” I had been highly skeptical. “You don’t know her. You don’t know us. You have the education to advise me, but you aren’t vested.”
I wasn’t being mean when I had said this to him before, I was just raw from the recognition I had been giving people access to me without asking them to prove themselves first through consistent and reliable presence and action.
“Yes, it’s OK if you come along.” I said to him this time. “How should we arrive?” he asked. I thought a while about that and said “We have to approach with a lot of urgent energy. This is a big deal and she needs us to behave accordingly, showing a lot of genuine concern, worry and committed presence no matter what she says.” “I see.” he said as if the word had six not two vowels. “Do we walk up there or do we emerge from somewhere on the roof?” I hadn’t thought about that, but I realized only one of us had been up on that highrise rooftop before, so I needed to help him visualize it. “We rush up there from the elevator stop via stairs, and we push open the heavy metal door. We focus only on her. We tell her how much we’d miss her if she went through with it, and we don’t flinch about that. We cannot seem burdened or put out because that’s what she expects. She will be scanning to see how genuine we are.”
“What would you like to say to her?” he asked. I am overwhelmed. I have never thought about it. He tries to help “How is she feeling right now? What’s going on?” I am in the intertwined layers of a complicated experience and first and foremost can identify her hopelessness. “She has no one safe to talk to. Everyone in her life is too wrapped up in their own world. No mother, volatile father, new marriages, new babies, no support system. On any given day, the adults relate to her only by what she has done or hasn’t done. She is either useful or expected to disappear into the background, yanked forward when needed.” “Oh. That sounds…” he pauses, signaling this is where I must do the hard work of finally identifying the emotion. I tear up. I am thinking of the details of her everyday world. I can see people, situations and feel the feelings. He is silent, not rescuing me from the pregnant pause between us. “Lonely” I finally say, and feel utter defeat. We sit silently, with more of my tears sending reinforcements from I don’t know where.
“How old is she?” he eventually asks. I can’t answer. She had gone to the roof, what was essentially the 11th story of her childhood residential tower, many, many times as a preteen. “Eleven to thirteen. Let’s say she’s twelve.” “What is she doing when we arrive?” I pause and let a stream of images flash across my mind, movie-reel style. “She is pacing with the raw energy of complex angst. She pauses briefly from time to time, as if to see if she can withstand the weight of her own psyche. She’s looking out at the city, not down, and taking in the other buildings. She loves to look out very far toward the edge of the big cemetery where its tall trees border the ice-skating rink. She finds the rows of graves and tall trees very soothing. They transform her from her invisible confinement.” “Confinement” he repeats, slightly curling his tone upward, but not quite into a question. Another rush of emotions get unleashed deep within me. I can’t say anything for a long time. “I see tears” he says gently, without prying or judging. He is merely letting me know he noticed, and he wonders if I noticed. I usually do notice my tears, but then I feel inconvenienced by them, so I just let them be, unwiped. “By age twelve, she is flat and green.” I say. He looks puzzled. “If you think of a healthy person represented as a fully spherical shape and of a vibrant color, between ages eleven and fourteen, she was the color of pukey green, and the shape of a hockey puck.” He looks very intent to visualize that. “Ah. She had been compressed” he says slowly, and with a lot of deep sadness. I am able to breathe a bit and pause because he understands the gravity of what I am describing.
“Are you ready to go see her?” he asks and I hesitantly nod, finally wiping tears and snot off my face. We are both quiet for several moments. I envision the rooftop, stepping out of the elevator shaft and seeing her. I am immersed deeply when he asks: “What does she think of us being here?” I don’t close my eyes to make the mental switch, it is easy. Her emotions are once again my emotions, in the present; I know them well. They are powerful, like hitting oil just beneath a Texas prairie; the force of released compression bursting high into the air, in disbelief it has now escaped the dark, enclosed ground. I scrunch my face, though I have to admit I am not surprised. “She’s highly suspicious!” I say. He looks puzzled. “She isn’t convinced I am here to help her.” I go silent, deeply feeling my inner twelve-year-old’s complex emotions. “She isn’t convinced that I can help her.” I realize. I can feel it intensely, like only I could, accessing two versions of my emotions, 40 years apart. My Therapist asks “Why doesn’t the young you believe the you today can help her?” The answer blurts right out of me: “…because I’m not qualified.” Tears, snot, intensity and clarity are all swirling within me. “She says I am no better off today than I was back then.”
It is a horse-out-the-barndoor moment. We pause. “Aaaahhhh” he eventually says with his full presence and compassion. I am back on the wooden Rotor ride from 1950s amusement parks, but I know I am supposed to be. We sit. We all three sit down on the rooftop: young me, today me, and my Therapist. After some time, he tries to ask questions and gently probes to see what I’m feeling and what I’m ready for. “Nothing, I say. We sit with it.” He wants to be sure: “What does she mean when she says you aren’t qualified?” I now wish he would just let me sit. Then I remember he is the facilitator, but it’s my life. “She sees I am still trapped in the world of chasing my worth through being capable and useful. She says people I have in my life see me with no more skill and curiosity than the people of my childhood.” I don’t like her. I love her. She’s just brutally honest, reaching right to the core of what I have never sensed, let alone acknowledged within me. “She sees I am, after all of these years, still fundamentally lonely. So I think we just have to sit here.” I said. “I won’t be able to convince her I can protect her, so we will both sit with this, on this rooftop, and let it be as it is.” I say. More heavy moments go by and I continue: “I can’t offer her an inspirational tale about how far I have come, because she sees right through it.” I rest. After a while I continue: “For the first time I just know there is nothing I need to do but sit here, seeing the young me exactly as she is, like no one else has, like no one else can. …and that’s the only thing, the best thing, I can offer to her right now…and with both of us up here, she doesn’t have to be lonely.”
Leaving the visualization didn’t require pulling away from the rooftop; it meant bringing the rooftop back with me into my present. Sitting beside my twelve-year-old self in silence, without an elegant fix or a performative speech to offer, shifted something fundamental in how I understood my own defense mechanisms.
So now I’m learning about loneliness, not because I want to analyze it, but because I want to recognize and acknowledge it while I am up here on the roof. I have long been content in my own company, fully capable of keeping myself engaged, learning and researching, while simultaneously experiencing a profound, bone-deep sense of loneliness. There is a massive difference between solitary peace and genuine connection. I can enjoy solitude while still starving for relational depth. When comfortable on our own, loneliness usually isn’t about needing someone to fill time or entertain us. It is rather about attunement and visibility. Connection.
A few dynamics often sit at the center of feeling lonely even around the people closest to us. We may be operating with a desire for rigorous honesty, strategic reflection, or emotional vulnerability that the people around us simply cannot match. Being surrounded by people who only meet us and others on the surface can feel far lonelier than actually being alone, because it constantly highlights what is missing.
As for me, I have to realize I have never grown away from my childhood programming that I must earn connection by being useful. I lead with over-functioning, which means people relate to my output, my knowledge, competence, and my reliability, not my interior world. This means I end up surrounded by people who love what I do for them or how easy I can make their lives, but who lack the capacity or inclination to ask about, or hold space for me. Worse, I have always had the bandwidth to generate 90% of the energy so my relationship can feel active, but it isn’t actually a mutual connection. It’s a performance.
So now I understand and I don’t at all mind as my days in solitude go by. I know I am best serving myself by hanging out with that amazing preeteen on that highrise roof. It’s our recalibration. I may not have wisdom for her, but I can perfectly keep her company in the stillness. I am learning what real attunement feels like so I never settle for a performance again.
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