Beyond the Armor of Loneliness

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I recently had an inquiry conversation where I explored my feelings about growing older, living alone, and envisioning what I want the rest of my life to look like.

For the past five years, I’ve often said, “I am alone but not lonely.” This phrase became part of my identity, a way to signal to myself and others that “I’m fine,” “I’m not lonely.” But during this conversation, as I engaged with open-ended questions guiding me inward, I realized this statement wasn’t entirely true.

Instead, I came to a deeper truth: I am lonely, but I am not alone. This realization shook me to my core. I felt a shift within—a cellular and gut-level rearrangement of my perceptions of myself, my life, and others. The truth is, like most people, I experience loneliness—sometimes profoundly. And it’s also true that I am not alone. I belong to Al-Anon. I belong to the natural world. I have a beautiful daughter, two loyal dogs, a community I’m part of, and friends. Even the neighbors I hardly know and the greeter at the grocery store are part of my aloneness.

Our humanity includes loneliness. It’s part of who we are. Yet, another essential part of our humanity is that we are not alone; we belong to all of life.

The phrase, “I am alone but not lonely,” was a kind of armor, protecting me from what I imagined others might think of my life. But the shift to “I am lonely but not alone” is richly paradoxical. When I admit and open up to my loneliness while holding the awareness that I am never truly alone, the loneliness itself softens and subsides.

Aren’t we all familiar with this feeling of loneliness? While in reality, we belong to each other; we are not truly alone.
 
In this inquiry conversation, I shared a poem as a Third Thing to help me listen more deeply to myself. This poem, acting as a Third Thing, brought unconscious insight, hidden in my psyche to the surface as a gift of awareness and action. 

Something More Than Lightbulbs   by Ariel Dorfman
 
Unexplainable in the middle of the night,
a bird is singing
and sings and signs again.
Only I am listening to him.
Only I am awake
Now when everybody
                        is sleeping.
I am awake and alone.
My friends are not here
my marriage is in trouble.
Now when I try to mearue 
if what I did
was good or bad,
when weith every turn of the toboggan
the question comes back a child,
like a lieaf that falls from the tree that is the same but older,
when I insist and insist again
that no one can hear me,
the bird continues
now as if no one were
hearing him either.
Perhaps he has confused my light
with the beginnings of dawn.
He sings, he wants company,
maybe he is hapy that day
has come back sooner than he expected.
Wiser than me,
with his hudnered times smaller brain,
so much wiser.
And I who can see no other light
than his song at night,
his song for me
because he thinks I'm the sun.
And now my son gets up
to pee.
Really, the night is full of dawns
I I were not embalmed,

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 I initially thought the poem ended with a comma, and that ambiguity resonated deeply. It left me feeling once embalmed—held by my old identity of being alone, yet not lonely. I could sense the bird arriving to sing for me, but what was her song? Could I even hear it?

How might you feel “embalmed”? Write about that. How do you identify yourself when it comes to being alone, old, young, or coupled? Take a moment to contemplate that.

How is the night, during this difficult time, full of dawns? Write and contemplate that.

Which lines in the poem stand out for you?  Write about that.

This poem, along with the open-ended questions posed by my partner in this inquiry,  offers me encouragement and insight. It’s an invitation to show up with equanimity, with curiosity, and with openness and courage to whatever arises.

Later, I discovered that the poem had a few additional last lines. Here’s how it truly ends:

oh if I could only sing
certain that in the middle of this night
the sun
the sun
               is rising
somewhere near.
 
 “Oh, if I could only sing,” the inquiry and poem brought me to the awareness of my own singing and song: I am lonely but not alone.  You, dear reader, are also here with me.
 
 
What might bring you to the awareness of your song and how the sun is rising, somewhere near? 
 
 
Here is a link to the entire book to purchase: In Case of Fire In a Foreign Land  by Ariel Dorman