There are three kinds of lonely — and I don’t know which this is

By David McElroy · December 19, 2020

I enjoy being alone. There are plenty of times when silence is my friend and other humans around me feel like an intrusion.

But there are times — such as right now for me — when I feel lonely enough that the silence is deafening and the empty space around me feels like a dark and dangerous pit into which I could fall.

There are people I could be with tonight. I could join groups in public. I could spend time with other people in private. But there’s nothing available to me that can put a dent into this terrible emptiness. And that’s hard to explain to others.

There are at least three kinds of loneliness — and I’m not certain which one applies to me tonight. I don’t know whether I can be honest with myself. Or with you.

One is the loneliness of a person who simply craves the companionship of other human beings. I’ve felt that way before, but it’s the easiest to solve. When I feel that way, I can solve it in a dozen different ways. I can see a friend. I can even drop by a restaurant where I know people.

The second is the loneliness for a specific person who isn’t there. I dealt with that in agonizing ways for much of the last six years. I’ve talked about it before, so there’s nothing new to say here.

The third kind of loneliness is for an unknown person — or even multiple people — to fill a specific role. For me, that’s the kind that comes when the gap between the life I imagine — in the emotional sense — is the greatest from the life of love and warmth I imagine for myself.

When something hurts, it’s hard to put labels on it. It’s hard to talk to other people about it. It’s hard to find rational words to define feelings that make my heart feel pain. I can tell you it hurts. I can tell you where my thoughts turn. But I can’t say — not for sure — where it started.

I know it’s not the first kind of lonely. The idea of spending time around most people is far worse than the notion of being alone. I don’t need random human interaction, either from friends or from strangers. I wouldn’t be good company for such routine and shallow interaction tonight.

I know what I want my life to look like. I can picture who I would like to be there. For a long time, I had a specific woman who was part of that picture. I wanted a life with her. I wanted a family with her. I just wanted a normal and loving and emotionally healthy life centered around her.

But then I lost faith in her. I stopped trusting her. I gave up on the words she had said that I had clung to like a drowning man clings to a life raft. She wasn’t going to be there. She wasn’t going to be good for me. I finally accepted that.

So I’m back to that gaping difference between what my life is and what I need it to be. Although I wouldn’t mind being wealthy or famous or successful in a dozen different ways, none of those are related to what I’m talking about.

I imagine someone who loves me. Who wants me. Who believes in me. Who has chosen to build her life with me. I imagine someone who I love and need and trust enough to build my life around her. Someone who I can serve. Someone I can devote myself to — in an effort to make her feel loved and appreciated and valued.

The idea of having that sort of mutual relationship with someone makes me feel right. It instinctively feels like the truth of the life I still want to live. The life that would be worth living.

I’m not a good match for most women — and most women aren’t a good match for me. If I just wanted anybody, that would be easy to change quickly. But the only thing that sounds worse to me than whatever it is I’m feeling tonight is the idea of being stuck with the wrong partner.

I can’t say exactly which kind of loneliness this is tonight. Even though I can try to make it rational — so I can attempt to explain it to you — I don’t have the words for what my heart feels.

But I know I’m lonely. And I know it hurts.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts