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Where I Stand Single: Alone, not Lonely

I used to teach freshmen at the big southern California university currently ranked third among the nation’s party schools, awarded extra points for its exceptionally high “bikini factor.”  I  tried to introduce them to literature, which from my point of view, meant empowering them ultimately to create a literature of their own.  Of course, like every self-respecting English professor who wants to leer into her students’ private lives, I required the frosh to keep journals.  Hey, it satisfied their 18-year-old narcissism, and it taught me that I would not be a freshman again for anything.  Nearly forty eager young faces and hard bodies in the class, and they had only one thing in common: All of them were lonely.  They went on and on and on about their loneliness.  They lived in dorms with thousands of people just like them; they joined fraternities and sororities filled with people who could be their twins; they partied like demon-crazed primitives to break down their inhibitions, and they remained intrepidly lonely.  How funny and how sad, I thought.  Any of them simply could turn 90-degrees and confess, “I need a friend.”  Problem solved…or not.  I remembered that when I was a freshman at that self-same Big U, I would rather have contracted a terminal disease than confess how lonely I felt.

               

I believe, based on my experience with all the melancholy freshmen, lonely equates with “isolated.”  And the two of them really do not have a whole lot in common with alone.

               

“Points we have where we all stand single,” Wordsworth wrote in his ginormous iambic autobiography.  Of course, he was the same guy who wrote, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” as if it were a good thing.  Billy Wordsworth had a big thing for solitary figures overwhelmed by their surroundings, lost in their landscapes; he considered them sublime. 

 

I totally understand sublime alone-ness.

 

Hey, what’s better than the windswept beach when you have it all to yourself on a stormy January afternoon?

 

And I’m a writer—not exactly the kind of profession that invites teamwork.  I’m not gonna make new friends at work except with my own self.  And, in all honesty, working hour after hour as a solitary writer in her cozy little garage studio, I have learned to like me.  I am as cute and funny and resourceful as I always imagined, and I eventually will learn to write, too.

 

I have worked really hard to become practically and emotionally self-sufficient—the long way of saying “okay alone.”  I believe I don’t make much of a partner if I’m not a good independent.  I agree with the axiom “good alone, but better together.”  I am good alone.  I have developed carpentry, plumbing, landscaping, dry-walling, and other skills to the point where I could build a house from the ground up—except for the electrical.  Can you imagine how much self-confidence I derive from knowing I can do that stuff?  I can cook like nobody’s business; my family stands in awe of the delicacies I can create even when they claim “we have nothing to eat.”  I could survive and eat well with very little.  More self-confidence.

 

Alone in no way scares me, because I like me, and I’m pretty sure God likes me, too.  Sometimes, alone makes communion a little easier.  I’m also pretty sure my father dedicated his after-life to service as my guardian angel, but he always lets me fall just far enough to skin my elbows and learn a lesson—a signature thing with him.

 

Isolated, on the other hand, looks, feels, tastes, and smells very different from alone.

 

Isolated is that feeling of being way-way-way out there on a limb with the hurricane howling and no one giving a [blogger will censor me].  I have lots of isolated, too.  Alone in my 4-Runner, running errands and calculating how many nano-seconds I have before softball, carpool, study group, or the nightly mountain of impossible homework, I crank-up the stereo and play “I Ain’t Got Nobody That I Can Depend On!  Yo tengo nada!”  My theme song. Wendell, my beloved Husky-Shepherd wonderdog always has my back; the other men in my life are as helpless and hopeless as bean-bag puppets, and they don’t just imagine, they believe I am the live-in help.  I try to tell them good help is hard to find; they remind me, though, they’ve found it, so it’s really not an issue.  The two daughters, 23 and 16, help as much as they can, but they got their mother’s independence.  I’m out on the domestic limb all by myself.  I comfort myself with my mantra, “If it were easy, bois would do it.”

 

Sing it with me, “I ain’t got nobdy…”

 

Alone and isolated look to me like an existential Oreo.  Alone is the delicious creamy center; isolated is the two pretty ordinary cookies kept perpetually separate and longing for one another’s company.  I’m good with alone.  Isolated, not somuch.

 

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