One good thing about loneliness is that it helps you access the emotions you need to fully experience some of the world’s greatest art, movies, writing, music, and such. That great, awful feeling where you feel so in love with a song at the same time that your chest physically hurts from how much things seem to suck. Such feelings broaden our life experience and make the happy, un-lonely feelings stronger.
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When you are met with the burden of understanding things and why they make you sad, to a point where it’s hard to relate to others and you eventually become lonely, you may hate yourself a little bit, and want to make yourself more boring, pretty, passive, submissive, easier to get along with, uncontroversial in any way. But by that point, you know too much about the world and what you do and don’t like about it, you know that you feel rather attached to your opinions, your tastes, your ideas, the things that might make you un-boring or un-pretty, and you don’t want to compromise them, because they make up who you are, after all.
The comfort in knowing that you are being your full self, or, if you don’t know who that is, just doing what feels right in the moment, will triumph over the comfort of knowing that some hypothetical other person is into a boring, pretty, one-dimensional version of you that doesn’t exist. Or at least the discomfort of smiling and nodding when you have so much you’d rather say will be so awful that you’ll prefer the discomfort of confusing people.
Tavi, for Rookie
