a guide to being lonely

accept when it comes and hope it leaves the same way: fast and unexpectedly.

Angels, as a gift to you while we’re off over the holidays I wanted to un-paywall some of my favourite editions of Bel’s weekend newsletter.

If you love Bel’s words as much as I do and want to enjoy it weekly next year, please consider becoming a SYSCA supporter, and PREORDER OUR BOOK 𓆩♡𓆪

Loneliness is an energy we all carry and have different ways of coping with. Life’s trick is to accept it as an unavoidable yet moving thing.

I feel like I’ve spent my life confronting loneliness. To choose a less traditional path in life, you have to rub up pretty close to it. People will ask, ‘but you’re doing it alone?!’ or, ‘but what will you do when you get there?’ or ‘but don’t you want children?!’ and you’re tested each time to believe that what you want and know is right for you may not be for anyone else.

In its worst moments, loneliness has made me give things up. Like how I stopped running (an old love of mine) because I grew so afraid of getting to the furthest place from my house, feeling so far away, and being so on my own, I couldn’t face the ache of having to turn around and run all the way back.

I’ve cried alone at airports, desperate for someone to hold my bags, tell me where to go, or tell me what to do. I’ve sat in the bathrooms at work, exhausted and stressed, my bleak lunch sitting in its Tupperware container, wondering what the point of success is if you don’t have anyone to share it with (you do, your friends, your chosen people, the people in your life you make a shape for that no one else can replace).

I’ve set my keys down on the bench on a Friday night after a long week and thought I would do anything right now not to be alone. Picked up my handbag at a wedding and left at 9.30, solo and not saying goodbye to anyone. On and on they go, these dark beads that thread around your neck, collecting each other along the way.

But these sharp, aching moments that feel like they’ll last forever only will if you let them tell you that. The trick, I’ve found, is to know loneliness works in two ways:

1. A natural experience of being alive, no matter how much love or light you have in your life, that will go just in the same way they have come.

2. A sign that there’s an absence of joy and a chance to go and find a new way to feel it.

There’s so much on the internet now that urges us to get good at being alone. To set boundaries and cut people out of our lives who are toxic or draining. To write journals. Wake up earlier. Be sober curious. Meditate. Tone our bodies. Tone our minds. Arrive on time. Sell our old clothes. Wipe down our walls. Not text our ex. Write back when we’re ready. Be grateful for the small things. Use serums on our skin. Pay our bills before they’re overdue - all these micro little moves to make life more bearable and living feel less lonely.

The thing is though, I think the experience of living is innately lonely. We’re born alone, we go on our journey through the world alone, each on our own missions to reach some kind of stage of calm, equinox, understanding, and above everything, connection.

There are moments (normie public holidays for me, particularly) when I feel envious of people whose lives look so effortlessly less lonely. They have close families who call each other often, traditions, cultures, rituals — threads that pull them together to the people they’re closest to with the gentlest of tugs.

I’m jealous of that simplicity. So I’ve spent my life setting out to make my own. My girl friends who feel like my bones. My colleagues who send me cute design shit to look at on the weekend. My friends who go to weird back alley gigs with. Fellow poets who want to sit on their balcony and drink instant coffee at nine at night. My sports friends who want to get me into watching the Warriors. My older friends who invite me to their four-bedroom homes and make me expensive cocktails. My yogi friends. My surfer friends. All these different people moving me into different well-lit rooms. The more I let them in, the less alone I feel.

So what if, instead of having a life that looks less lonely like it should be on the outside, we make our own webs of weird and divine connections instead?

I was thinking about this as I was driving home from a night class the other week. It was dark. Darker than it normally is. The streets were echoingly empty — even the famous noodle shop on the corner near my apartment was devoid of its usual life. I’ve driven that route a hundred times over, but in that moment, it dawned on me that I no longer hated the fact I was doing it alone. I felt the absence of someone who used to be next to me, the yearning for someone who can’t be, and the pang of unfixed relationships in my life, but still, there I was, being ok about it.

After all this time, I’ve learned to recognise the lone when it comes, accept that it’s arrived, do the best I can to make it as comfortable as possible, and hope it leaves the same way it came: fast and unexpectedly.

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If you love Bel’s words as much as I do and want to enjoy it weekly next year, please consider becoming a SYSCA supporter, and PREORDER OUR BOOK 𓆩♡𓆪