to be alone

There are days when being alone spells out freedom of the utmost kind. And there are days when being alone is a torture of the deepest kind. It’s sweet, like the way poison tastes. Being alone, it isn’t something you know how to deal with until you have no other choice but to deal. To handle, to bear the burden. To find a way to keep going with the weight living in your skin. 

I am quite well aquatinted with the fact of being alone. I find myself in that state more often than I would like, more often than I truly realize. It’s not really something I would recommend, but I can’t deny the pros of being okay with your own company. And you only reach that point when you’ve spent enough time with you and only you, enough time to learn you don’t have to hate yourself simply because you lack companionship. 

I loathe the notion, the believed principal, that one must love themselves before they are truly able to love one another. I think it’s bullshit, to be quite honest. In fact I believe it is said in the bible that we love because we first have been loved. Meaning we learn to love because we have been giving an amazing example of what that truly means. Now I am inclined to believe that compassion is learned through loving and first having compassion on yourself. In all honesty I don’t have it all figured out yet. It’s not as simple as I wish it was.

What I do know is that being alone doesn’t have to also mean being lonely. It is quite simply put in the definitions of the two words. Alone being the absence of others, and lonely being the sadness that can come with the absence of others. I won’t be so irritating as to say that it is simply a choice not to be lonely. But it is a choice to try to find the light even when the night has fallen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that loneliness isn’t always a choice, often times all it is is the byproduct of circumstance. But that dictating your life by loneliness or the desire to rid yourself of it, will not lead you anywhere good.

I’m guilty of this, on more than a few accounts. It is not so easy to choose to find the light, and sometimes you truly do have to choose because sometimes the sun doesn’t shine as bright as we’d like. Some days the clouds are given rule of the skies. But just because all you can see are the clouds doesn’t mean the sun has gone away, it is simply hidden. It’s funny, how in crisis, in hard times, we become like children. Either to forget that the sun will still come out again tomorrow, or to remember that stars will still shine even as we sleep. We become like children either losing our faith or gaining it back tenfold.