Her Charmed Life

Loneliness is not about feeling like you are alone, like you have nobody. Loneliness is feeling like nobody has you.

I’m not really a lonely person, at least I’ve never thought of myself that way. I definitely get into moods where I need some time to myself, but not like some people do. I don’t need to “recharge” my social battery. My battery does not run out (socially that is). Sometimes, when I’m in one of my aforementioned moods, I just need a few moments for me to love myself. I do it by going out to eat lunch alone, getting a quick coffee and a new book alone, going to a craft store and browsing the shelves alone. I love it. Doing these things reminds me that I can indeed function on my own, like a real life adult or something.  All that being said, I have never felt like this in my life. I don’t know how to stop it anymore. The closest I can think of is when I was living with my friend Hannah for a few years. I felt ostracized from my family, but she and her family helped me through it. I felt sad, not lonely. 

Now, I feel like an alien in my own life. It’s like some extraterrestrial thing sucked out my soul and shoved it in a jar, pushed to the back of some sterile shelf on some metal ship out in the universe. Now my body is walking around and living my life. It’s all hollow and… weird feeling. I feel empty and full. In the moments of my day, I find joy and happiness mixed into all the other muddy shit. Then, of course, as I get ready for bed and reflect on my day or week, I come up blank. I cannot find the reason anymore. I’m trying to pan through all the soot and mud in my life, searching desperately for the gold (or fuck even a goddamn piece of gravel honestly) and can’t find any. “These feelings are temporary, these thoughts will pass, it’s normal to feel this way,” I coach myself, verbatim from my therapist. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to sit in silence on my couch for hours, days. I want a hug, I want connection. I want someone to know me as deeply as I know the others around me. I want to feel seen. I want that fucking alien to put my soul back before I get stuck like this.

Sabrina makes me feel seen. I can tell she knows me and she is a true friend to me. I love her so much. I know she is giving me the connection I want but it feels…weird. It feels like Sabrina is on the opposite side of some huge wind ravaged chasm. She’s screaming at me all the things I need to hear and she’s trying to throw me a rope or something to help me. But I just can’t hear her, she’s too far and the wind is too loud and I feel like I’ll die of fright. I feel like it’ll be better if I just shoo her away so she doesn’t have to spend her energy on me. These feelings are temporary, these thoughts will pass, it’s normal to feel this way. It was my 25th birthday a few days ago and a bunch of us went to Florida. Myself, Liam, Sabrina and James, and a few of our other friends went. It was a lot of fun and I had a great time. Now when I Iook back and think about it, I want to live there forever. I felt at least a little seen. 

I cover uncomfortable things with dark humor and disparaging jokes. I want to say something like “I’m so fucking dramatic, right?”. Make fun of myself, get you to agree (haha, that’s just Gabrielle, she’s a little weird but we still love her), we both metaphorically laugh together in that online internet way (chuckle, chuckle), roll our eyes and continue onto lighter topics. But I can’t do that now. I don’t know what lighter topic to move onto, I don’t know how to make a joke about the dramatics of my life when it’s not even fucking dramatic. It’s real and how I feel and I’m getting tired of it. 

Don’t isolate, don’t isolate, don’t isolate, don’t isolate, don’t isolate, You are real, you are real, you are real, you are real. These feelings are temporary, these thoughts will pass, it’s normal to feel this way. Ugh, this is basically my daily mantra now. (chuckle, chuckle)