You are lonely. There are nights when you lie awake at night in your bed feeling empty, wanting someone to be there lying next to you. To hold you. To kiss you. To validate you. But, for now, you are alone, curled up under your sheets all by yourself in the dark, wondering if you will ever find love; a best friend to spend the rest of your life with. To yearn like this is very physically draining. Maybe that is what eventually tires you out to sleep at night. It is not just you; so many people feel lonely like this. What can we do about it? When does it end? When will we finally meet the right person?
Recently, I met someone much older and wiser than me, from a far away land. He taught me an important lesson that has since changed my life: how to invest in your love.
This is what to do when you have these moments, when you feel very much on your own, even exceedingly happy, but like something is missing.
You do this every time you feel scared or lonely or hopeless, or have a discrepant event where you see what could be. An example of these discrepant events would be: a man harasses you at bar or on the street walking alone, and you think to yourself, “this wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t alone tonight," and you imagine an alternate scenario where you are safe and protected by a warmer body. Or, you are at a party and all of the sudden you realize you are the only single person in the room, and you catch yourself staring at two joined hands for a prolonged amount of time and you think, “I deserve this love I see between these people just as much as anyone else, so why don’t I have it? I’m ready, I’m waiting right here!” You are losing patience and feeling desperate.
To invest in your love means that when you experience these moments in time or these lonely thoughts, you simply take a moment to put a quarter in your bank for the future. You take these experiences and you remember them, feel them, acknowledge them, even treasure them and you save them. You store them away for the future, each distinct, unique emotion, so that one day you will get all of them back. And it will be even more special when you finally get them back and feel them because you created the love that you eventually received.
But remember, this only works if you truly love yourself. You can only get back the love you think you deserve. You have to see things and feel things in a way where you can say, “I deserve this. I am worthy of that. That is something that should be happening to me.” Instead of harmful, untrue thoughts like, “Why am I not good enough for that? Why does nobody want me?” You will never invest love for yourself that way.
If you realize that you catch yourself saying these negative thoughts to yourself, take a moment each day and begin the first steps of investing in your love by simply beginning to practice speaking kindly to yourself. You will see how much love you receive in response from the universe and those around you simply by realizing that you deserve it and you are worthy of that love purely from existing.
In the meantime, while you are waiting for your investment to make its return (to meet the right person, or the next person), you treasure and embrace your lonely self. Loneliness is a great gift. It is beautiful thing to learn to care and love for yourself and fill your own deep, dark voids, some of which no one else can fill. You can begin to ask yourself and to understand for yourself what you really want and need as a unique individual. No one has the power to satisfy your needs unless you give that to them, and you know for yourself firsthand what you want and need to be happy.
For me, I have come to understand that it is a majestic, beautiful thing to stand on a street corner in New York City, the center of the universe, in the midst of millions of people, and feel all alone. To breathe through that sensation is liberating, exhilarating. One day, I will never be able to feel that again.
And lastly, my dear friend taught me that, when you feel lonely, tell your friends. Reach out. Literally say, “I feel lonely today.” Because chances are, so many people around you your age and in your situation feel the same way, and we forget that just standing in solace together in a deep pool of your own loneliness is enough to actually make it drain away.
It’s human nature to want a partner to always be there to confide in, to take care of us, and to be there for and understand us. But we will never be able to understand each other because we are each our own person with our own minds. So when we say “I just want to be understood,” what we really mean is, “I just want to be accepted." Turn to your neighbor today and choose to accept them. We all just want to be accepted. By choosing to accept one another, we can change the world. We can celebrate the lonely chapters of our lives together by allowing the acceptance of each human individual in the present moment. We can invest love not only for ourselves but for our planet.
When something on our Earth goes horribly wrong for mankind and we see things in our lives and on the news that are inconceivably spawned from hatred and intolerance almost every day, we can invest in love. We can say that “we deserve better." We as humanity are worthy of better. We see that, we acknowledge it, we feel it, we remember it, and we invest in the love from that moment into our future. And one day, as we work together to achieve a better world for each other and ourselves, we will finally get back our investments and receive the love that we knew we deserved.
