Imagine what it would feel like to be alone and never again be heard

By David McElroy · March 13, 2019

I just had the strangest feeling of being alone that I can ever recall feeling. I don’t know what I want to say about it, but I feel oddly driven to talk about it — while I still feel whatever this was.

It felt like a dark black fabric was suddenly closing in on the room around me. I didn’t feel threatened. I didn’t feel any ill health. It didn’t represent death. It simply felt like a heavy curtain coming to separate me from everyone else in the world.

I suddenly felt as though I could walk out of my house and into the street — and nobody would be there. It felt as though I could walk or drive or fly all over and I would find nobody. I’ve never felt quite this way — as though I would never again see anyone and nobody would ever see me.

I’ve never felt so alone. I’ve never felt as lonely as I felt in that moment.

I recently listened to an account of a National Geographic photographer who went into a jungle near the Amazon River in South America in 1969 to find a tribe which had no contact with the outside world. Loren McIntyre had gone in as part of a group of three men — who landed their plane on a river — but one of the men became very sick, so the pilot took him back for medical help.

McIntyre stayed all by himself — and members of the tribe found him.

For the next few weeks, he couldn’t communicate with anyone and he was constantly worried about his safety. He had no way to explain to these people who he was and he could understand little of their ways. Some of them thought he was there to put a spell on them — and those people tried to kill him one night.

McIntyre had no way to let the outside world know where he was and he was living in fear of his life — all alone among these tribe members. More than once, he was sure he was about the die — alone in a pitch black jungle with no one to comfort him.

As I listened to his story, I felt a tremor of terror about what it must feel like to be away from the world you knew — among strange people who saw you as a strange invader — and think you’re about to die. I wonder if that story might have influenced my sudden experience a few minutes ago.

The feeling of the heavy black cloth surrounding me reminded me of the feelings I experienced when listening to McIntyre’s fear of dying alone in the dark of night.

In moments such as these — when I am face to face with such a feeling — I’m graphically reminded that my core fear is of being completely alone, even though I’m surrounded by people.

I’m around human beings every day. I get along fine with most of them. I like some of them. I know how to move among them in socially acceptable ways. But I’ve always felt like an alien among them. This is a an old theme for me. You’ve heard it from me before.

I fear being invisible. I fear being unheard. I fear not being understood. I fear having no one to listen and share this world with. You see, I love this world and I love my life. I want to experience every bit of life I possibly can.

I want to see everything and feel everything and touch everything around me. But I am somehow terrified of not being with someone who sees what I see and hears what I hear and experiences what I experience.

I’m terrified of being full of love and beauty and experience — and having no one to share it with. The fact that there is so much of deep wonder and awe and beauty to experience makes the fear even worse. I need someone to share this experience of life.

When I felt this blackness enveloping me a few minutes ago, it felt like a door closing — as though I was being given a horrifying preview of what life would be like if my worst fears came true.

There was a time when I thought I wanted a huge audience to listen to me, but I honestly don’t care about that anymore. Today, I understand that I really write and speak for just one soul — but capturing the love and attention of one seems to be the most difficult task I’ve ever faced.

Until I learn how to do that, I will continue to live with this haunting fear that chills my heart and leaves me alone in the cold.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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