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Politics and Activism

Loneliness in a World Full of People

Despairing Thoughts on Empty Feeling

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Loneliness in a World Full of People
Elizabeth Paige Modesto

Dear Me, Myself, and… You,

My thoughts have a tendency to wonder away from me. The hinges of my mind squeak with curiosity. My thoughts scatter themselves, roaming free. What a beautiful dilapidation the mind is. Offering solstice, but all the while restless desolation in its midst. Such can only be a comfort for those fully themselves.

I have a deep sense of loss inside me. Nestled behind my sternum, in my bones and in my blood. But whom have I lost, but myself? I hear the world around me, humming with life, a knowing life, a life of purpose, direction. But there is no such peace in me. Rather my soul rattles in the confines of my body, unable to breath with the thickness of my thoughts. I’ve filled myself with plumes of deep grey deliberations that only seem to bleach me of the life I once lived so well.

But more recently I have felt like I am the only constant in an ever-changing world. My understanding of people and who they are has been continuously shattered. Leaving me with a feeling of loneliness in a world full of people. All I know is that there is a knot in my stomach and a desire for reckless spontaneity.

Life is confusing, in some ways enthralling, but in other ways completely perplexing.

I want my soul to be free and to become comfortable with the presence of myself. The hope of the discovery of my place in the world, amongst and despite its people, fills my chest with a nearly intolerable ecstatic eagerness. To find what my purpose, what my contributions, what my efforts, will be and come. I aim for greatness.

Greatness: to lead a life not worth remembering, but rather worth not forgetting. No matter what we become, I know we at least have the potential to be great.

These ideas that persistently plague the confines of my skull insistently seek release.

And greatness is often too far to reach. Because as humans we are faced with indecency, of others, of ourselves. And here our eloquent nature is smudged by the lives others live. Disrespect, whether intentional or naive, is far too inevitable. And through this we come to put others into inferior positions, allowing, or rather, coercing each other to fall into a feeling of dehumanization of “other.” And here we become acquaintances and, in time, prisoners of loneliness. And yet here, in this pit of despair that echoes through your sternum and pounds even past the point of bruising, we are wholly and fully human. Here we feel. Pain. Anguish. Grief. Distrust. Hopelessness. We find ourselves trapped in a place where the only light that we can find is what exudes from the depths of our soul. And it isn’t easy to find, and it isn’t as close as we’d hope, but we find our souls here. When we cave into ourselves, out of despair, out of need and loneliness, we can either burst forth into a million stars, in rebirth, or we can collapse further, into a dark place, forever bitter. It isn’t our choice whose what happens to us, but it is our choice of what we become of it.

And I like the sound of redemption.

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