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You Will Always Feel Alone Until You Realize This One Thing
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” — May Sarton
Loneliness is a feeling, not a condition. There are plenty of people who live relatively insular lives who don’t feel lonely in them, and there are equal amounts of those who are perpetually social and yet feel miserably alone.
We need each other, but we need ourselves first. As long as we feel alone in our own company, we will feel alone even when surrounded by others.
We can only let people see us as deeply as we have seen ourselves, and if we can’t be true to ourselves even when alone, how can we expect to show up that way when others are watching?
This is the basis for the belief that you can’t love others until you love yourself. Before we accept certain parts of ourselves, we will always try and hide them from everyone else, and the more we hide, the less we are seen. The less we are seen, the less we are understood. And the less we are understood, the less we can be loved for the entirety of who we are.
Before we can introduce our deeper selves to others, we have to reintroduce ourselves to that person — to the one that has always stuck around even after being told she was not enough of this and too much of that.
You can’t lose yourself but you can lock yourself away. Someday, if you want to experience the love you deserve, you have to loosen the lock.
You have to look at what you really want and ask why you believe you shouldn’t have it. You have to look at who you really are and ask what is so wrong with being that person. What are you risking if you let the world see your vulnerabilities, insecurities, and imperfections? What are you risking if you don’t?
Brené Brown said, “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.”
Until we belong in our own bodies, we can’t feel as if we truly belong anywhere else…
