Question of the day.

   How do you deal with loneliness? 

   My answer: 

   For me, it really depends. I generally like to be alone and can emotionally handle being alone for quite long, so while aloneness and loneliness are two different things, I think that also makes my threshold of feeling loneliness a fair bit higher than many people’s. I have also experienced many kinds of loneliness often so in a way I’m sort of used to it. I guess it’s like when you suffer with chronic pain your pain tolerance goes up gradually, or when you chronically under-sleep you function better on no sleep than an average person who sleeps 8 hours per night typically. So most of the time I don’t really even have to deal with it in any special way, I just notice that I’m feeling a bit lonely and move on. When the feeling gets more intense, I will try to alleviate it by talking to my family, or Misha, or people online, or go into my Brainworld.

   Sometimes, however, I feel a kind of loneliness that I have talked about on here many times before, which isn’t so much about craving contact with other people but more something from deep within, which does not go away when I interact with others. In fact, it can be the opposite if I am feeling this way while being surrounded by a lot of people, because then I see the disconnection between me and the people even more clearly. With this kind of loneliness, it really doesn’t matter if someone is physically present with you or not. You feel as if there is a huge wall between you and the other person/people, and while you can still communicate, it sort of feels as if each of you were speaking a different language and they’re not really mutually intelligible. Also, the world on either side of the wall is completely different and neither of you can have a clue what it’s like on the opposite side. So it’s actually easier to be alone while feeling this way, though you sort of feel lonely even with yourself, I really don’t know how to put it better. I think this kind of loneliness is the worst, because it’s so intense and gnawing at your brain that you can’t really ignore it completely, while at the same time there isn’t really a good way to get rid of it. It just has to lift on its own until the next time it comes. I usually get it particularly strongly during what I call AVPD flare-ups, which typically happen to me right after I had to do a lot of peopling, so I assume that this must be an AVPD symptom for me. What usually works best for me is just trying to distract myself, do something fun or intellectually and emotionally absorbing. I suppose there must be some link between this thing and distraction, because I often feel this kind of loneliness at night.

   Another thing that I experience that sort of feels like a kind of loneliness is in relation to the phenomenon that I call sensory anxiety, which is a complex thing that I don’t know how to describe well but I’ve already written on here a bit a couple times before so won’t go into detail here. When this sensory anxiety hits me particularly hard, I find silence very difficult, and I tend to feel safer when there are people around me, or Misha. This sometimes leads to very conflicting and weird feelings when I feel I can’t handle social stuff at the moment but at the same time feel scared of being alone. Or when there’s such a situation that the people are actually unwittingly the source of my anxiety in a way or are contributing to it. Here, distraction also helps to a degree, although it depends how high the anxiety is, because when it’s like through the roof I obviously can’t focus on anything else anyway. I also always listen to some music that has no creepifying potential at all or whatever else that I feel like listening to, and generally try to surround myself with a lot of friendly sensory stimuli, especially auditory ones. This always helps, though the degree varies depending on how anxious I am. 

   Generally though, I deal with loneliness of any kind a lot better ever since I have Misha in my life. Misha is also a creature who needs a lot of his own space, and he may not necessarily be up to spending time with me whenever I’m feeling lonely, but just knowing that he’s somewhere in the house often makes me feel a bit better.  

   How about your coping strategies? Do you actually experience loneliness a lot? 🙂 

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