Received
There’s a version of loneliness that doesn’t look like anything. It doesn’t look like an empty apartment or a quiet phone or a Friday night with nowhere to go. It looks, from the outside, like a full life, people who are glad to see you, a calendar that asks you out, evidence on every surface that you are known and wanted and not alone.
And still. The waterline.
You probably don’t call it loneliness. The word implies absence, and absence isn’t your problem. Your problem is something more like depth, the specific, wordless distance between being seen and being reached. People see you clearly, your warmth, your humor, your availability. All of that is real, all of it is genuinely you. It’s just that the exchange happens above the waterline, where the presentable parts live. Below it are all the parts. The conversation rarely goes down there. You have learned, without quite deciding to, to keep the surface calm enough that no one thinks to look.
Here is what that looks like.
You’re good at the surface of the gathering. You ask the right questions, laugh at the right moments, move through the room in a way that reads as warmth and ease. And yet on the inside there is a slight lag, the way a conversation runs a half-second out of sync. You’re right there. Responsive, warm, present by every visible measure. The timing just never quite lines up. On the way home something sits in you that you don’t have a name for. You tell yourself you’re just tired. You are not just tired.
People tell you things. You’re the one they open up to, in the car, at the table, in the conversation that runs long because something in how you listen makes it safe. You’ve become fluent at creating the conditions for other people’s honesty. Your own has nowhere natural to go, not because you’ve hidden it, but because the role you occupy in most rooms doesn’t have a slot for it. You call this being a good listener. It is partly that. It is partly that a room organized around your listening has no natural moment when the listening turns toward you.
You are known, but in pieces. This person knows your humor. That one knows your history. Another knows what you’re working on and why it matters. No single one of them holds all of it at once, and you’ve arranged it, mostly without meaning to, so that none of them have to. And if you’re honest, something in you has preferred it this way. Being known in parts is a controlled exposure. Being known whole, someone holding all of it at once, seeing where the pieces meet, is a different thing entirely. You have arranged your life, mostly without naming this, so that it hasn’t been required of you. The version of you each person knows is real. You are somewhere in the combination of all of them, waiting to be in the same room as yourself.
You don’t let much space accumulate in your calendar. Not because you’re afraid of solitude, you actually do fine alone. What you’re managing is something else, the specific quality of coming home to a full life and still feeling the depth. Movement is easier than noticing. You call this having an active social life. It is partly that.
Someone asks if you’re really okay, the kind of asking that waits for the answer. Something in you moves toward a real response. You feel the opening. Then you calculate the time it would take, the explanation it would require, the particular discomfort of watching someone try to hold something they weren’t expecting. You say you’re fine, or you say you’re tired, or you say you know how it is in a way that closes the opening without quite lying. They nod. The moment passes. You are relieved and bereft simultaneously, in proportions you don’t examine too closely.
You can have a real conversation and still leave the room untouched. Two hours at the table, talking about things that genuinely matter, what’s changing, what you’re working through, what you’re afraid of. The conversation was real. The people were real. You leave, and you understand, dimly, that everything above the waterline was fully present. You are not sure anything below it was in the room.
Afterward, you check your phone in a way that has nothing to do with who might have texted. You’re looking for something, evidence, maybe, that the evening landed somewhere. That something got through. The night was good. You put the phone down. You got through the evening. The evening didn’t.
What all of this adds up to is not ingratitude, and it isn’t a verdict on the people in your life. Those are real. What it points to is something more precise, the difference between connection and contact. Connection happens at the surface, and you have it, genuinely, in abundance. What you’re missing is contact, the feeling of someone reaching below the waterline, finding what’s actually there, and not needing it to be different than it is.
A full life and a lonely one are not mutually exclusive. You already know this. You’ve known it the way you know things you haven’t said out loud yet, in the behavioral tells, in the things you think about on the way home, in the proportions you don’t examine too closely.
Something worth sitting with:
The question isn’t what’s missing from your life. It’s where, inside all of it, something is actually getting through. The answer, if you slow down enough to look, is probably more specific than you’re expecting.
and,
Him, again…
There is a version of you who has already done the thing you’re about to do.
He got up at six. He has the workbook. He completed the workbook. He did not check his phone before getting out of bed. He is not available today, he has somewhere to be, probably, a commitment entered into with the easy confidence of someone who sleeps without conditions attached.
The one who showed up instead is still locating the workbook, uncertain whether it was the workbook or the journal, genuinely fine with one cup of coffee before anything counts as a real decision, already slightly behind on the day and at peace with the distance.
That one is also you.
He gets to start too. Not when the other one releases the schedule. Now, with the coffee, with the book he can’t quite find, at the pace of the morning he actually has.
Until next week, take care of yourself, particularly in the moments when you’re being very good at the surface of something.
What “Old Man Talks” is about.
So much me in this. In my youth people even invited me to parties to get everyone loosened up and talking to each other. Then, I left. I was always the listener. But, when I talked about how I felt or what was going on with me, people were suddenly busy or I saw their eyes glaze over like this was not on their agenda. So, I learned to be surface, funny able to converse with anyone, but never getting down below that waterline except with very few over the years. After my husband died I really isolated because no one wants to talk about death or grief. But, I am returning to the world now...a different me. I will find people who aren't afraid of that waterline. And, I am also fine alone.
I know what you mean. Everyone tells me their stories, but if someone asks me how I'm doing, I always say "I'm fine, perfectly fine." I have often wondered about this capacity within me to always tell everyone that I'm fine.