What if lonely isn’t a bad thing?
One of the reasons I hopped straight from one marriage right into the other 10 years ago is because I’m a huge wimp when it comes to all things unknown.
It’s weird, I’m not someone who is scared to try new things, but I really value my security above all else, and I will do anything to protect it. (That’s why I’m such a fan of my friends who protect my peace, yanno?)

This is something I’ve discovered about myself through a lot of therapy and all that other good stuff, that it’s important I feel like my basic needs (and, in turn the basic needs of those who I care about) are being met.
I know that sounds sort of — um, obviously, Jamie— but it’s more than the obviousness. It’s like really /really/ important to me. So much so that I’d fight for it with all I have. No matter what.
Of course that’s how I ended up in survival mode for so long.
(Wow, all these things I’ve been writing about over the last few weeks are really starting to come full circle in what I hope is a superb new outlook— but I’m just getting started, so follow me for life tips and all that.)
Anyway, I digressed again, the whole point here is that for some reason I’ve always equated being lonely with it being a bad thing. It’s such an awful word, the negative connotation of it and all that.
But maybe it’s that being alone and being lonely aren’t really synonymous in the ways that we’ve made them— but more than that, maybe the actual act of being lonely gives us time to process things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to understand. Not just about ourselves, but about everything.
Maybe that’s why so many of us Xennials (I’m owning that as my generation, by the way— my friend Christa and I decided that I should just live in the fact that us 1977-1982 born babes are the weirdest, yet coolest generation of all time. (She didn’t say that coolest part, she’s a proud gen-xer and would never!) are just now realizing we haven’t figured out at all who we are… we’ve been so busy listening to all the noise that we haven’t taken the time to get lonely.
If you think about it, that’s really a pretty unique thing that happened to us. The way the digital chatter and noise changed as we were children. How half of our childhood was analog and the other digital… we didn’t grow up with the noise, but we learned to embrace it when we were teenagers, and then we spent our next years adding to it in ways that we thought or hoped were beneficial.

I don’t know what happens next, what the next version of those of us who put it all out there and share our lives online looks like— but I do know that I want to remain more in charge of what I do and what I share next time.
Or, I mean— this time?
And this time I’m also going to try and be lonely.
Because maybe that’s where we figure it all out.