When you’re a teen, or at any point in your life, being alone seems very much impossible. You’re expected to interact with others, make friends, create bonds, and relationships. It’s engraved in us. What are humans if not social creatures yearning for connection? I thrived in it much like anyone else. I had meaningful relationships, I fell in love, and jumped into meeting people with eagerness. I wanted to be liked, to care for others, I wanted perfection in the complexity of companionship. It was almost a foolish hope. No one tells you that sometimes hoping is just dreaming wide awake and with your heart, instead of unknowingly and asleep with just your brain doing whatever science explains about dreams. Daydreaming with your heart is hard, especially when there’s no waking yourself up to snap you back to reality. Just pain, you pinch yourself until you remember the now, and by then all is broken and bruised; heartbreak is imminent.Â
Now, I’m a young adult who hasn’t experienced romantic love since their teenage years. I’m single and I see love everywhere I look. I used to wonder, how can I find myself in a position to love? I’ve conquered no better relationship than the one I’ve made with loneliness. It was bittersweet, but with time loneliness and I made our peace, much like how love appeared—in unconventional ways. Still, I write these words as carefully as I can, I’m no expert or therapist, and I live by the idea that we truly know nothing at all. But, I like to think that I’ve gotten better at the sound of loneliness.Â
For so long, the ideas of love I encountered were nothing like what I wanted. It made sense, then, that I became more and more used to the dramatic assertion of “I will be that lady with two cats and no love.” I was exactly like the tale of that whale, calling at a frequency that others of its species could not hear. It seemed that way for a long time, where my love, needs, and desires were simply at a different resonance than others. It must’ve been, since I made no contact or connection with anyone.Â
I’m almost twenty-three years old, it’s been more than a few years since I said “I love you” with that kind of hopefulness one does when you’re in love, like the world is burning and you have all the water to take it on. After it all passess, you notice you’ve poured enough water to feed an ocean. Then you’re just there, in the middle of a vast, dark, and all encompassing force, not sure if anyone is even capable of hearing you while it’s all so muffled. Much like BTS sings in their song, “Whalien 52,” bringing the tale of the lonely whale to life: “In the middle of the vast ocean, one whale speaks softly and lonely…no matter how much they shout it won’t reach.” It seemed my new reality had been kind of written in stone.Â
However, the singers also allude to the hope of calling until the song is someday heard, until “the endless signal reaches somewhere.” And, indeed it does. I can’t give you a ten step guide on what to do so that your signal, which feels like it’s always hitting a wall, reaches someone, or anything because no path is the same. However, I can tell you what the sound of loneliness and the quiet of its existence is like to me.
I am not romanticizing loneliness, but there is a kind of experience one goes through when we find ourselves in solitude. When there is no buzzing, no channels to cut through the sound of our own existence, there are a few questions, conversations, and even realizations that we end up having with ourselves. The sound of my loneliness was excruciating at first, eager to reach out, to know that it made itself known to someone so that it could rest—and by the result of its failure it only grew louder, worse. Until the four walls it kept hitting reached back. I had to do something with myself, if I wasn’t able to reach anyone, maybe I could start by meeting myself, reaching myself.Â
That’s all I did. The sound of my loneliness became a way of knowing myself. It became hours of reading, watching shows, going outside, and yes, hours of talking to myself.
If surely one day they would reach someone else, I didn’t want to keep waiting around feeding into the idea that I would ultimately be completely alone. That no one would sit down to understand my frequency. In using loneliness to know myself, I gave my heart, mind, and soul the opportunity to truly get what they really wanted—what I needed. That strengthens your standards, so that people that don’t deserve you don’t get to enjoy your frequency.Â
Yes, my call out to the sea did end up reaching somewhere. But one of the most important things you learn while echoing loneliness surrounds you again and again, it’s that connection doesn’t always translate to romantic love. There are people in my life that, despite the difficultness of my frequency, have done their best in tuning in and understanding it. None are romantic relationships, I’m still twenty-three with an absence of that soft burning in your stomach that makes you say “I love you” to a particular person just because.Â
But, in the sound of my loneliness, I learned love moves differently, speaks differently, and shows up differently; in many languages, ways, and moments. Sometimes, love is not even the first rule of life; respect, honesty, and commitment are. It’s very rare that we allude love to the contrast of loneliness, when it’s not really its antonym at all, but well, I guess that, as humans, most of the things we do are weird.Â
After all, what even is the sound of loneliness?Â