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Let’s talk about loneliness.

My name is Heidi Hinda Chadwick, I’m 51.5 years old, and I’ve had loneliness following me around the goddamn place like a stinky slinky shadow for pretty much all of my life.

Of course, I’ve tried the usual means of getting rid of it.

Like distracting myself mahoosively with scrolling endlessly on reels until my thumb goes numb.

Like grasping to create social arrangements to fill the empty days in my diary from a panicked place, rather than from true desire for connection and play in that moment.

Like hating this feeling and shaming myself for feeling it, hiding away until it passes, and then popping out into the sunshine brightness as if nothing is amiss bar the mist I’ve just been avoiding.

Well, my loves, the buck stops here.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life repeating this fever dream state of fear and shame about something that is so prevalent in our western society.

Let’s talk about it! For as we know, it’s by exposing those stories that shame does such a great job of keeping in the dark, and canoodling with the shadows (for it is shame’s job to do so and it’s good at it!), that causes them to dissolve into dust like some spell or curse finally broken.

The Saturday night feeling.

This is what I call it.

This loneliness.

It started way back when I was a teenager. Desperately desiring to fit in with the “cool” group. Wanting to be their friend. To hang out with them. In some sort of painfully (bless) twisted belief that by doing so said “coolness” would rub off on me and change my teenage life!

Bah!

And so, when weekends came around, I’d feel this awful sense of “I’ve no one to play out with,” get myself all worked up into a ball of merciless pity partying, which included tears, obviously, until one of these “cool” kids telephoned my parents’ house (I grew up in the 80s, remember), to see if I wanted to go out with them. You know. Bowling. Cinema. To eat at Pizza Hut as it was all the cosmopolitan rage at that time.

The tears would stop, and a small candle of hope would light up in my heart, and off I’d go.

Did I fit in? No.

Did I really want to? Not necessarily.

But I didn’t want to be alone because at that point in my life, I had a gaping hole of nothingness, and not in the Buddhist ideal of that good, full, nothingness, at my centre. This aching hole needed filling, and this is where my oh-so-young, clueless, and unwise mind went searching for that fast-food-fix type of nourishment.

Roll on to the following weekend and it was rinse and repeat. Ad infinitum for many years.

Loneliness is a sad lanky listless creature who can’t and won’t ever be filled. It can never be satiated. For it’s not meant to.

Now, it’s an obvious thing to say that loneliness is not the same as aloneness.

Being alone, as cheesy as this sounds and feel free to shoot me as I write this, is the ability to be in “all one” ness. Complete. Whole. Full. And not needing, in any graspy, clingy way, something or someone to fill its cup. That cup with a hole in its bottom.

The thing is loneliness is the feeling that something is missing. It’s a lack. A scarcity of self. And there be no thing or no one that can ever make us feel whole that exists outside of ourselves.

Having no sense of my self, it would be a trip to Asia, a cliched losing the plot, many years of mental health struggles and shame, discovering yoga and 5Rhythms dance and art as medicine, and many, many more years of dropping back and down into my own body, before I came back home.

Home to a feeling of full-fillment. Of satisfaction. Of wholeness in and of my own self.

Yippee!

Now, this is all well and good, but put down those party hats and kazoos for a moment as this story doesn’t end there. Nope.

Despite all of this personal development work (by the way, can we find other words to use than this?), the Saturday night feeling still persisted. And when it came upon me, its impact was disproportionately disturbingly strong.

When loneliness hits, it feels like being clutched in the scaly horror-handed stranglehold of terror. It feels like being squeezed to death and sucked into a vast black hole, the blackest I’ve ever seen, where I will cease to exist. The visceral feeling of panic to my whole system is so severe that it feels like a life-or-death situation.

Now maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “Girl! You be overreacting and scaring the sh*t outta folks with the extreme flowery, though beautiful (thanks) descriptive essence of ya words!”

But I’m not. I’ve never written that down before, and I can feel a sadness, a grief at my heart as I do so. To name it not shame it.

This has been my experience, and though it’s come and gone over the years, and though I’ve a deeper, more embodied relationship with my own self, and even though I can “see” when it arises and have the wisdom and awareness not to get so sucked into this vacuum, it’s still present.

Over the last few months, my beloved and I have separated. And though this is the right steps, and I’m actually in a really good place, this old, shadowed familiar has been visiting me once more. I can see how much I react. Where I’ve grasped at connections and to filling my diary and distracting myself, and I’ve had enough. And so, I decided to investigate this further.

And this is where I’m at.

1. The horrifying physical and emotional reaction I’m having is the echoes of an old story I’ve been carrying around with me that I’ve never had the balls to face in 30-odd years.

2. My mind has been believing this story, and what that means to who I am, without ever questioning its truth.

3. This has become an identity that I’ve been living in. A fixed sense of self. And each and every time it has arisen, I’ve attempted to do all that I can to get rid of it. And in doing so have kept it alive, a creature of the shadowed night, for all these years. That is, by continuing to react, as opposed to respond, to it, it keeps its shape.

4. The existential terror I feel is actually a nervous system response.

5. Instead of being scared of loneliness, what might it be like if I was curious about it instead?

6. Maybe loneliness is lonely too!? I wonder how it might be to befriend it. Sit with it, talk with it, get to know it?

7. By staying with the echoes of loneliness, letting it scratch its nails down my insides, it can start to relax. Maybe loneliness is terrified too? Maybe it needs some love?

And you know what? Though this experiment with loneliness is a new one for me, the difference I’m experiencing feels profound.

I’m staying with my own centre more and more, rather than abandoning myself (aha! This could very well be where the threads of loneliness wove its monstrous story in the first place! Take note dear reader!). This feels like its building a muscle inside. A capacity that I’ve not felt before.

Taking my foot off the pedal of grasping and neediness, the most bizarre thing is happening. The world and people around me are inviting me to connect more than usual.

And I’m actually excited about this feeling of loneliness, as I get to know it more. I’m even welcoming it into my home, laying the table for tea for two, even though she doesn’t eat cake, she prefers one’s soul!

For the thing is, loneliness is a part of me, and in one of those bloody paradoxes that life is made up of, if I continue to avoid it, I’m keeping that part “lonely!” I’m abandoning myself as I seek to do everything I can to unleash and unlatch this limpet from my luminosity!

We are all vast beings of universal and infinite space. We have orbits and solar systems and stars and mystery inside of us, so endless in enchantment, that if we really, and I mean, really, understood this, we would fall to our knees in awe. When we speak of being enlightened, I no longer see this as some kind of grand state for some grand guru who sits cross-legged like some grand purveyor of something just out of us mere mortal practitioner’s reach. Hell no.

Enlightenment is to shine the light of the cosmic galaxies that we contain, the multitudes that we are, on all parts of us. Nothing is left out of that light. Of that embrace. No aspects of what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls our “not beautiful.” We are kind and cruel. We are compassionate and uncaring. We are generous and selfish. We are nice and total dicks. We are supportive and jealous. We are humble and greedy. We are full of belonging and lonely. And every single aspect of ourselves is part of our genius. It’s the light we shine in the weaving astronomy of the world.

So in that case, I propose the following:

Be lonely yet introduce her as your mate. Your new companion. Your compatriot in your full and precious life.

Be lonely and let her scrape away the pretence from your heart. Sure, it will hurt for a while, but you’ll be alright hon!

Be lonely and know that she’s sometimes a liar just to get you to play with yourself. (Ermm. That came out a bit wrong!)

Be lonely and shout it from the rooftops so others can nod and wink at you from across the street, or the dining table, or the party, or in your bed.

Be lonely and let it salt and shake you to deepen your stance and stand your ground, whilst repeating under your breath: I will not forsake myself again!

Be lonely, just don’t be(lieve) lonely.

Be lonely and know that in that moment that’s who you’re intimate with so might as well lean in and cosy up.

Be lonely and go lick your neighbour.

Wait a minute. That last one. Don’t do that. My mistake!

Lonely is a call to take your own hand and kiss its palm.

So, instead of letting loneliness eat away at you in mini bites with its sharp teeth, swallow it down whole first, and let her be all warm and comforted in your belly, and maybe over time, you absorb her rather than the other way around, and you both live together, pals in the fruitless resistance of a life of real connection and belonging, for the rest of your long and lavish and luminous life.

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