Imagine being surrounded by a crowd of people all around, in a room tightly packed. Just bodies of different forms and types, everywhere. The constant nonstop ongoing chatter of words exchanged between bodies, but just garble. The shining animated faces mere masks of features, all nose and mouth, cheeks and eyebrows. The cacophony of this movement mixed with high pitched voices, the loneliest sound in the world.
Maybe, this is really what being lonely in a crowded room feels like.
Luckily for us, there are other spaces we can seek refuge in. Our own special room. The silence there seemingly deafening but easier than the noise outside, which is forever thundering. A room that takes up less space than the cramped physical ones we often find ourselves in.
We all have this room we gravitate towards. A floating skybox in some other inner realm inside, away from the physics of it all. A room nestled snugly inside a maze of many multicoloured ones through which we keep running around in circles for the most part of our life. Hoping to bump into someone who can briefly pull the blinds off the black walls of this room to see us. To find our eyes. The windows to our soul leading to this thing they call the energy source of our life.
The trick is that this source thing can be awakened only when we make a genuine soul connection with another being. Most of the time, we are severely disconnected, not only from everyone else but also from our own selves. Our life filled with bustling multi-storied rooms piled on top of rooms full of disconnected beings. Where everyone is a homeless owner. With each blow we lock the doors and find comfort in our own aloneness. A different kind of aloneness from solitude, a darker one.
Learning to make connections is a real challenge. In this sea of floating weeds of disconnection, even the right connections get lost. Just like it takes a deep connection to uplift our spirits and vibrate to the frequency of feeling alive, it can take a deep disconnect to remove us from it too.
Sometimes, it is important to retreat and disconnect in our search for connection.
Last year, I was introduced to this cesspool of disconnect. I lost my father. Whenever I found myself having to tell someone that he had passed away, the disconnect grew thick around the walls of my heart. With each phone call to the family after he breathed his last. While providing information to the caretakers in the nursing wards. To the priest in the cremation grounds. The taxi driver who drove with his remains. The grocery shop owner. The bank manager. The air hostess in the flight back home. The neighbours. Friends on text. Colleagues on zoom. Saying it over and over again to everyone and anyone while accepting condolences and sympathies in a dreamlike state - it grew a little denser.
The grief was the loneliest I have ever felt, remotest from feeling any real connection with anyone.
I was struggling with the shock of his passing, the fact of it, the truth of it, the massive reality of it. The words of it. I completely retreated into myself occupying that room within the particles of my body.
What made me more distant was the fact that I was also physically disconnected from the world when my father died. Under lockdown in a small town, masked, almost totally devoid of a real human connect that one needs at a time like this. After all aren’t birth and death supposed to be these significant events where we come together in celebration and mourning, along with the ones we love and care for? Then how can we be robbed off our basic need to connect at a time like this? But we did get thieved, and there was nothing anyone could do.
During those days, I found myself feeling cut-off from those who have been my anchor for years, maybe to protect them from the experience of my solitary churning. Or maybe, for my own sanity. Some of them did not know what to say to me to make it seem better. Others waited for me to share, to open my own bleeding heart up to their scrutiny. Some others just gave up, unable to give parts of themselves to me that I was specifically looking for. The want to be strong and in control overtook my need for being vulnerable and defenceless in my moment of loss. The burden of being stoic is the heaviest when you feel anything but that.
It wasn’t just my father’s death but the desperation of not being able to do anything while waiting in smelly hospital halls and listening to under-prepared doctors spout half-baked theories that I learnt that I was completely alone. Maybe, everyone really was. My father seemed alone. I was alone. My mother was alone. My brother across the seas was alone. My husband and child back home were alone. We were all alone. In our separate waiting rooms.
My loneliness of watching my father deteriorate over days that led to his death was so intense and the undercurrent of the pain so severe that I had completely depleted myself of the need to connect meaningfully with anyone. Instead, I took to the little window on my phone desperately. I devoured copious amounts of advice online. Searched frantically for some form of a digital Band-Aid for my walled heart.
Two things happened because of this. One, I felt that the world needed to know more about my father because he didn’t get the funeral that he deserved. Second and more urgently, I felt the need to connect and hold on to my father in the digital archives of my life. In the absence of his real physical presence, I used my written expression to search for the depth of that connection that had just slipped through my fingers in a matter of a few days.
I decided to share my writing. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Since we live in boxes of neatly folded and sorted acts of self-preserving disconnect from others, we do not know what to do with our feelings. Should we? Shouldn’t we? As I let my feelings flow on the screen of my social media to a bunch of acquaintances who had known me at some point through the various stages of my 48 years of evolution, I found myself steadily feeling liberated of my burden of aloneness.
We underestimate the kindness of strangers.
The disconnect I was feeling with the people in my life was a real one. I feared that my father’s death had changed me, something inside me was never going to be the same. That his passing will change the equation of all the relationships I had ever known, within the family system and with others outside of it. That what he held together by his mere presence, will wither. The phone calls will dwindle. The world will forget the loss of his being and will move on. Precisely what I was being advised to do - move on. I was bitter, angry, feeling deeply let down by a lot of people in my life. I was thrashing about, desperately looking for connection, but all I was getting was a version I didn’t need.
We just do not know what to do with the loneliness and grief of others. All it really takes is listening, feeling the pain of others momentarily, and a deep understanding of one another. It takes an allowance of humility and a common ground of sort from us, as people thrash their way through their own method of processing. It takes empathy. And that helps us form a connection. The rewards of which are so fruitful that everyone benefits from sharing it.
Was this a real connection though? I asked myself repeatedly. As my list of acquaintances grew, so did my inbox. I found people reaching out to me, privately, on phone, on text, on email, just sharing their precious stories. I wasn’t the only one hurting I realised. Not the only one to have felt this disconnect within myself and within my community. There were many who knew this hurt because they had felt it themselves. They had lived through it. We were alike. All the heaviness that I was feeling, every little iota of loneliness I was carrying had been felt by someone before me. It wasn’t unique, this listlessness. It was universal. All that confusion. All the heaviness. I was surrounded with kind strangers I had met online. We formed a connection. It was a real connection. There was no expectation and there was no judgement, only the sharing of a common wound. A mirroring of the other.
This need to connect is a primal one, because we know deep down that that’s the only thing that can saves us. Unfortunately, life is no easy feat. Finding a deep connection is not only rare but also often impossible. Sometimes, the ones closest to us cannot fathom us. It’s no one’s fault. But the nature of life is such that even if we find and make these connections, we do lose them, eventually. Sometimes to death but most often to life itself. Sending us scurrying back to our little lonesome rooms made up entirely of melancholy and doubt.
The absence of connection, they say fosters loneliness. And we cannot make connections if we aren’t honest about our feelings in the presence of another person. In a world far removed from a humane one, we find ourselves inside a paradox that teaches us to hide our true feelings and project versions of ourselves which are universally acceptable. We find ourselves fitting into moulds pushed farther and farther into capsules of disconnect. How do we find meaning in our feelings and who can we share it with without the fear of judgement, in complete honesty, as transparent as water? As lightly as a leaf that falls on top of leaves to sit gently among others.
There’s always therapy which many aren’t willing to take, there’s always medication that is far too easily available, there are retreats. There are, of course, more mindless means of distractions to fill these holes in the form of shopping malls, exotic holiday locations, suites in expensive hotels for the ones who can pay for it. For others, there are affordable digital devices, a stream of reels, updates, pictures, quotes to choose from. We have learned to solve a problem with another one. Seemingly forming connections, but from afar, ultimately all turning out to be empty. Or, at least this is what I thought. Till I felt totally isolated in my own situation.
What was needed was some honesty, and a raw admission of the state I found myself in for anyone to spot me. I did get found. Through an act of willingness to open.
We cannot really connect with anyone if we are constantly trying to perceive life as a burdensome, 20-legged beast on our backs, fearful of its constant bite. There is no rule in the book that says that we cannot find new connections. We can.
The world is only as scary and as distant as we think it is. There are real people in the corridors of the same rooms that we lock ourselves in. They are looking to pull the blinds; we must learn to let them in. And in time, even reclaim old connections that have waited patiently outside these rooms for us to step out into the light again.
It is not so bad outside.
We know that we have to walk alone but can do it with a little help from others every now and then.
