I was fourteen when I left my home in Massachusetts and moved to Washington, D. C. to study ballet. My mother found a school on Wisconsin Avenue in D. C. that offered ballet and academic subjects
under the same roof, the first of its kind in America, and I wanted to be there, but my life as I knew it, was upended.
Many of the students lived at home but I was in a smaller group of girls from out of town. We stayed in a housing complex where a woman was meant to watch over us but I rarely saw her. My feelings of separation were extreme. I had hoped my mother would stay with me for a few weeks when I got there so I could adjust, but the idea of being on her own in a strange and busy city without my father must have been too scary for her. As a result, there was no one to settle me in. No one to help me with my homework. No way to fill in empty time. No one to comfort me so my father bought me a goldfish.
When my parents left that first afternoon, I stood in the middle of my small room and stared at my goldfish, unsure what to do with myself. Fourteen was a pretty young age to maneuver life on my own but I fell into a routine. I got up, I said good morning to Goldie, tapped food into her bowl and watched her swim around. She was supposed to make me feel less alone but she looked pretty isolated herself. I packed my dance bag, I went to the cafeteria for breakfast and I crossed the street to the
school. I took a ballet class first thing in the morning, changed out of my sweaty leotard and tights into my gray school uniform, and went to math and French class. After lunch we had another ballet class and then we did English and geography and science.
In the evenings, I washed out my dance clothes, hung them on a wooden dryer rack, sewed new pink ribbons on my pointe shoes, did my homework (math was difficult for me) and I fell into bed. I made friends and I got reprieves, suspended moments of grace when I forgot about myself and my feelings and placed my focus on someone or something outside myself, but like a boomerang, no matter how far or hard I threw it, the loneliness always found its way back to me. Many mornings, I cried before I
left my room. I wiped my eyes, left my room and pretended I was okay as I walked steadily and kept my head down. I felt ashamed because I hadn’t seen the other girls crying but they hadn’t seen me either. It’s possible to be lonely in a crowded room.
Two years later, when I moved from D.C. to Manhattan to apprentice with a professional ballet company, I was a highly trained ballet dancer, a young woman who knew how to take care of
herself and a lonely young girl with a broken heart. I felt isolated and sad, I thought I was alone in those feelings, but a decade ago, I realized that even rock stars feel disconnected. I had the good fortune to attend a talk by the wildly famous drummer from that wildly famous Liverpool band. He said, “We’re all lonely but we can’t tell that to everybody we meet. When I pick up the dry cleaning and the woman behind the register asks me how I am, I can’t moan at her, ‘I’m lonely.’”
I see loneliness, not as something to be healed but rather something to be managed with kindness and compassion. It isn’t a moral failing or proof that something is wrong with you, but a normal
human emotion that occurs when you crave connection. Whether you’re wildly famous or almost famous, married, single, have thousands of followers or shun social media altogether, most of us are members of The Lonely Hearts Club at some time or another and we’re all trying to fill in the gap.
There are choices. You can tighten up and push loneliness away, but that robs you of your peace. It leaves you feeling pressured and disconnected. Another choice is loosening up and making enough room in your being to accept loneliness as one of many human emotions. That choice can bring you peace. It’s possible to be lonely and peaceful at the same time.
Acknowledging that other people feel the same way that you do is a way to heal. The Dalai Lama says, “I have always considered myself as just one among billions of people in this world. Whenever you consider yourself special, you begin to feel lonely and you fall victim to depression.”
After a lifetime of trying to exile, abandon and throw loneliness aside, when it comes, I can try to snub it, eat through it, drown it, drug it, shoot it, burn it, run the car over it, steamroll it or fly it to the moon, but it isn’t going anywhere for very long. It’s ever faithful and no amount of praying, meditating, breathing or having sex will banish it forever. It’s like an annoying uncle who corners you at a family gathering, tells you sad stories you’ve heard a hundred times and you can’t seem to get away.
It’s important to be kind to yourself when you feel separate. Beating yourself up only makes you feel more abandoned than you already feel. Soothing yourself can make you feel like you’re a part of something or someone else.
Pema Chodon says, “When we feel lonely, cut off or rejected, we can regard what is happening as an opportunity to touch that very tender place in ourselves.”
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