I was fourteen years old when I\u00a0left my home in Massachusetts and moved to Washington, D. C. My family didn\u2019t\u00a0come with me. My mother had scoped out a school on Wisconsin Avenue that\u00a0offered ballet and academic subjects under the same roof, the first of its kind
in America. It was called The Washington School of Ballet. I was pursuing a\u00a0serious ballet career and I\u2019d been traveling back and forth for about an hour each\u00a0way from Worcester to Boston four times a week for classes. I needed to find an\u00a0easier way to train so my mother wrote to them, they talked on the phone and\u00a0they offered me a scholarship.<\/p>\n
Many of the students there lived at\u00a0home in D. C. but I was in smaller group of girls from out of town. There was\u00a0supposedly a house mother who was meant to watch over us but I rarely saw her. I\u00a0had hoped my mother would stay with me for a few weeks when I got there so I\u00a0could adjust, but I guess the idea of being on her own in a strange and busy\u00a0city was too scary for her. As a result, there was no one to help me with my\u00a0homework. There was no one to comfort me, so my father bought me a goldfish.<\/p>\n
When my parents said good-bye to me and left that first afternoon, I stood in\u00a0the middle of my small room in a women\u2019s housing complex called McLean Gardens,\u00a0staring at my goldfish, unsure what to do with myself. I was grateful my\u00a0parents were letting me follow my dream, but fourteen is a pretty young age to face\u00a0life\u2019s challenges without being supervised.<\/p>\n
I fell into a routine that made me\u00a0feel safe. Each day, I got up, said good morning to Goldie, tapped food into\u00a0her bowl and watched her swim around. She looked pretty lonely herself. I went to\u00a0the cafeteria for breakfast, packed my dance bag, crossed the street to the
school, took a ballet class, changed out of my sweaty leotard and tights into\u00a0my gray school uniform, and went to math and French classes. After lunch we had\u00a0another ballet class and then we did English and geography and science. In the\u00a0evening, I washed out my dance clothes in the sink, hung them on a wooden dryer
rack, sewed new pink ribbons on my pointe shoes, did my homework (math was\u00a0difficult for me) and I fell into bed. It didn\u2019t matter that I wasn\u2019t being\u00a0watched over. I was too exhausted to get into any trouble.<\/p>\n
The loneliness was extreme and I\u00a0cried every morning. I remember feeling ashamed of that. I hadn\u2019t seen the\u00a0other girls crying but they hadn’t seen me either. So I did the bootstrap\u00a0thing, pretending I was okay as I wiped my eyes, left my room, straightened my\u00a0spine, walked steady and kept my head down. The only time I felt okay was in\u00a0ballet class.<\/p>\n
I wrote a heartfelt letter to my\u00a0mother every day, mailed it, and she corrected my English with a red marker,\u00a0used the word correctly in a sentence, (she was an English teacher) and sent the\u00a0letter back to me. Two years later, when I moved from D.C. to Manhattan, I was
a great speller, a learned grammarian, a highly trained ballet dancer and a\u00a0lonely young girl with a broken heart.<\/p>\n
Childhood wounds never go away\u00a0entirely but we can learn to manage them. We can pick and choose with whom we\u00a0discuss these very sensitive topics so we don’t feel shamed about what scares\u00a0us. The idea is to get connected, not disconnected, and talking things over with\u00a0a kind and compassionate person can help a lot. It can make you see that you\u2019re\u00a0not alone.<\/p>\n
I attended a spiritual gathering\u00a0once and the wildly famous drummer from that wildly famous Liverpool band, the Fab Four, spoke.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re all lonely here,\u201d he said, \u201cbut 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\u00a0am, I can\u2019t moan at her, \u2018I\u2019m lonely.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Apparently, even rock stars get\u00a0lonely and like us, they don’t want to talk about it. I know I’ll never heal my\u00a0loneliness because it\u2019s been deep seated since I was fourteen and it isn’t a\u00a0disease. It\u2019s the human condition. Whether you\u2019re madly famous or almost\u00a0famous, married, single, have thousands of followers or shun social media altogether,\u00a0we are all members of The Lonely Heart\u2019s Club and we\u2019re all trying to fill the\u00a0gap. We do it with spirituality, art, writing, painting, watching TV, texting, volunteering\u00a0or listening to a friend. These things give us short reprieves, suspended moments\u00a0of grace when we forget about ourselves and our feelings and place our focus on
someone or something outside ourselves. But like a boomerang, no matter how far\u00a0we throw it, the loneliness always finds its way back.<\/p>\n
After all these years of trying to exile, abandon and throw loneliness aside, I\u2019ve learned to accept it. It\u2019s become\u00a0clear that whether I try to snub it, eat through it, drown it, drug it, shoot
it, burn it up, run the car over it, steamroll it or fly it to the moon, it
isn’t going anywhere for very long. Resilient as a cockroach, it always comes\u00a0back, ever faithful, and no amount of praying, meditating, breathing or having\u00a0sex will banish it forever. I\u2019ve learned to make friends with it and see it\u00a0like an annoying uncle or cousin who corners you, talks your head off at a\u00a0family gathering and you can’t seem to get away. As uncomfortable and unrelenting\u00a0being lonely is, it\u2019s perfectly safe. It won\u2019t kill me. But trying to find a way
to eradicate it just might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was fourteen years old when I\u00a0left my home in Massachusetts and moved to Washington, D. C. My family didn\u2019t\u00a0come with me. My mother had scoped out a school on Wisconsin Avenue that\u00a0offered ballet and academic subjects under the same roof, the first of its kindin America. It was called The Washington School of Ballet. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2430,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions\/2430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}