A Think They Call Loneliness

This morning I woke up abruptly from a dream.

In this dream, I’d just crashed my mom’s suburban into several (I think four) other cars in a parking lot. My first thought was “Holy shit, does this car have full coverage insurance?” This is how the mind of someone that was raised without money works. My concern was not about my body, my safety, honestly I didn’t even consider in the dream if I’d hurt anyone, I just assumed no one was in the other cars cars. All I could think about was, how will I afford to fix all of this? I also considered how stressed out this was going to make my mom. I paused momentarily in the dream to consider if I could just leave without anyone noticing. But I saw a man walking toward my car in the dream. My last thoughts before waking up were “I wonder if he would report me”.

There was more to this dream, that was just how it ended, and it was really disorienting. I woke up and immediately got out of bed (as I usually do), but I was dizzy. Even kind of giggly. Maybe I was relieved that it wasn’t real. Especially because what had happened earlier in the dream. I was at some sort of convention. It was a big building, in the style of a classy hotel. I remember it being near a river because there was a bridge I was trying to get to when I was in the parking lot (before I hit all the cars). The bridge led to what looked like a city. Not a skyscraper kind of city, but a cobblestone and brick kind of city. Charming and knightly.

A lot of people from the convention were crossing the bridge to the city to go get dinner. I was alone but saw some people that I’ve followed on Instagram. Thought leaders you could say, just in the sense that they aren’t afraid to put themselves out there with their opinions. I’ve interacted with these people to show my support. I usually don’t get any word back but I want them to know I appreciate them for being persistent with their counter culture beliefs. I remember introducing myself by name and then giving my Instagram handle “delightfully_taboo”, thinking that might ring a bell, but I was dismissed.

One girl that I think very highly of essentially walked away from me while I was talking. Her disinterest made me feel unimportant. It was like I needed her to validate my existence. I talked with some other people after but was not able to snap out of the feeling of inferiority. That was when I decided to just go grab dinner. I was literally going to follow the crowd and sit off by myself, or maybe I expected to meet someone while I was out. It was a familiar feeling. A feeling I had several times in my life as a kid that switched schools quite a bit.

When I first entered high school, I had just moved back from Kuwait (where I’d only been a semester). The high school was in a new city where all the kids practically grew up together and even knew kids at the neighboring schools. I sat in the bathroom for lunch that first day. It didn’t take long before I had friends, but I know that feeling of penetrating loneliness so well. That is probably why I was so desperate to never feel it again. Perhaps that’s why I stayed in my toxic relationship all those years, to never experience the shame of being by myself.

Why does loneliness bring us shame? I recall the Billy Joel lyrics “they’re sharing a drink they call ‘loneliness’, but its better than drinking alone”. When someone is eating by themself at a restaurant, there’s this urge to feel sorry for them. Especially elderly people, we assume they have no one and that this hurts them. It's as if we believe we don’t exist when no one is watching. “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Of course it fucking does, and maybe it even hurts. Maybe it cries and we just don’t notice because our eyes are not trained to see that way.

I think my dream was showing me something about shifting my perspective, but I may try to look at it a different way to be sure.

Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa