Loneliness and Acceptance

1993 Words4 Pages

I feel uncomfortable in my own world. Being alone unnerves me. I always have felt the need to share my world, my mind and my feelings with somebody. My feelings about myself seem less important than what others think of me. I'm scared of being lonely. And so are we all. We all seem to be on a continuous search for someone who will really love and understand us. Someone to provide us with a purpose for life. And yet I think we are all essentially alone. We are alone in our thoughts an emotions. The first time I really felt alone was when I was leaving Kentucky. We were at the airport saying our last good-byes. I was leaving everything and everyone that I loved, understood, cared for, to come and study in the Bay area. I was leaving familiar territory and moving into an unknown, unfamiliar world. I was saying good-bye to people who I had either grown up with or those who had seen me grow up. All my memories and emotions were attached to them. They were people who I thought really knew me and understood me. Yet every one of them had their own impression of how I should feel. Excitement, joy, fear, and sadness being the most popular. However nobody really knew what I was feeling. I felt all these emotions blended into an unique emotion of my own. One that I could not share with even my best friend. When I expressed my fears and anxiety about leaving Kentucky, no one seemed to really listen to what I was saying. They kept saying it would be alright. I was mature and almost an adult and the Western world with its great material temptations wouldn't corrupt me. But in my mind I felt isolated. I wanted them to sit and feel my anguish with me. But they wanted to pacify me, console me as though I were a baby. At that time I fel... ... middle of paper ... ...e or friendship. We are taught that we don't have an identity if we are alone. Which is why we treat loneliness as a disease, one to be avoided at any cost. Loneliness is viewed as an inadequacy of our personalities. Though all of us are taught to be independent, our independence is superficial. We can cook, clean, and do our laundry but we can't seem to take care of our emotions independently. We are taught that we need to share all our emotions. And I believe that however hard we search we can never get the kind of understanding that we are looking for. We are taught to be uncomfortable in our own world. Society conditions us to believe that we are inadequately equipped to be alone and content. And that alone always means lonely. Works Cited Macdonald, Elizabeth. "Odalisque" Encounters (Edt. Pat C. Hoy, Robert DiYanni) The Mc.Graw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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