On being a loner

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself (Nietzsche).

I don't remember when exactly I became a loner. Maybe it was in elementary school when I finished my assignments and tests ahead of the other children and was the first to play with the toys. Maybe it was after the constant moving during those years as well. Making new friends was never hard, but keeping them was difficult for some reason. It could have been that my sister detested my existence and so I was left to play for hours with stuffed animals as my dearest friends. I was always one to want that singular best friend, that one girl or guy that I did everything with. Yet, everyone around me prized the value of large social circles. So my world eventually moved from the longing to play with others to delving into the stories that people created between the covers of a book. Those stories became my best friends, they never shunned me; always waiting patiently for me at the end of a school day. They stood staring at me in the first light of morning and were gentle in their closing as I fell to sleep to their words.

Books became the refuge for everything. They became my teachers, my mother, my father, my family, and my lovers. They taught me the lessons of life, they never minded the tears that fell upon their breasts, and they never once made fun of me for knowing what the next sentence would be. The hours I spent wrapped up in some book were more precious to me than any encounter with the frail and changeable humans that were my supposed peers. As I became a writer, I began to write the world the way I wished it was for me. Making lovely gestures on behalf of men, and creating daring and complex women who weren't afraid to put it all on the line. Then came the devotion to music...Oh! The worlds my mind would create in the symphonies and rhythms. The melodies that took me along on rainbows and lasers to places far away, with winds changing the colors in the trees and the skies becoming trains to the next station of my imagination.

Somewhere in this, as I struggled to stay with my feet grounded in the realities of life, the begging for love and affection from those around me, the waiting for people to show their genuine selves, the bold and brave and complex characters that I knew had to be inside those physical shells they walk around in... but they never came. I tried to love the simplicity, but they never returned it by loving my complexity.

After numerous failed relationships in both the romantic and friendship arenas, I retreated more and more into my own psyche. Flushing out with each failure what my part must have been, what my flaws were, and ultimately coming to the conclusion that I must be this horrible monstrous being. That I was the common denominator in all these situations, and because each ending of a connection was the same rhythmic pantomime by the other person, the consistency of disappointment had to be my fault. So further each betrayal sent me into the solitude. In that solitude, I discovered more and more, that I have really been alone all my life, and that my connections to others were random and fleeting. That people liked to be my friend at a distance, but to really commit to a great friendship with me took too much thought and consideration on their part, and way too much effort. That trying to get to know me proved difficult and too lengthy a process. Better for them to assume that they know parts of me, and call on those parts from time to time, but never ever embrace the whole. I was and am just too much.

And so as I sit here on this rainy (absolutely lovely) day in Los Angeles, I find comfort in the fact that I am after all these years embracing that I am a loner. A lone wolf, a dragon in her den, and solitary practitioner who can come out of her shell when needed but feels best curled up in her cavern watching the world out of the window after so many years of standing outside the window looking in wishing I was asked to dance. What better time in my life as a writer than to embrace a writer's way... the path of solitude and reflection? To admit, I love being free, and alone.

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society. –Henry David Thoreau, journal, February 8, 1857