Rain On My Parade

The last couple of days I have been in kind of a bad place. I was feeling quite lonely and anxious but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it till now- until other people told me about their problems and I found the solution in their journey.

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I think my trouble was that I was feeling very lonely, and I felt like other people were feeling just as lonely, but they weren’t doing anything about it- they weren’t expressing it in the most healthy or productive or obviously explicit way. Obviously I couldn’t force them to express anything, but it made me feel like I was alone in my sadness, and in a way, I didn’t want that to be a burden on the fake happiness that everyone else was parading around.

Coming from so many different places and so many different homes, every single one of us, to varying degrees, unknowingly had our support systems ripped from underneath us- whether that be our friends, our families, or our significant others. And though we may not have realized it at first, I think we all tried to quickly replace that emptiness -that hole- with whatever relationship or friendship that would fit in it. It was rash, and it was only momentarily gratifying, and the repercussions did not surface until today.

The weird part is: I coped with this last week, and today three different people had the same reflection and sort of realization (with the urging of yours truly) today. All three are really good friends, and if anything, are even better friends now, not only because we shared our stories and our feelings, but because we shared our sadness, and for some reason there is no other bond like the one forged from the shared silence of understanding someone else's pain.

This is going to sound really awful, but I feel really good. Obviously I don’t feel good that other people are sad, but I feel good that I’m not alone, and even though it was an emotionally taxing conversation, each person seemed to feel more at ease and more satisfied with the direction of their understanding after the conversations. I just thought it was kind of strange that all three happened today. I think part of the reason was because of Chris’ Minerva Talk, which was reallllllllly good and quite emotional as well.

When one person choses to be vulnerable in front of people, it becomes exponentially easier for other people to make that leap as well.

The result is this: all of the lonely people are still very much lonely, but now at least they are lonely together.