What does it feel like to live completely alone? originally appeared on Quora: The best answer to any question.
Answer by Adam Gerow, writer, on Quora.
I've started to understand why solitary confinement begets mental illness. I live in a modified form of it. I shudder to even imagine the real thing.
People register changes in you, reflect you, bounce a version of you back to yourself. People help you mark the passing of time, and the distorted version of time-without-people can't be understood from the outside. People eat your emotions; having big emotions around other people, in itself, is a form of processing. In isolation, those emotions fester or atrophy. Some feelings crumble and blow away like dust, other linger, maddeningly, like a mouthfull of hair.
My mind copes in ways I didn't expect. Without other options, I manufacture a sense of belonging. I drink coffee with other people. We don't talk or even look at each other, but I like the feeling that we drink coffee together. I hate traffic less than I used to, because traffic is one of my main group activities.
I feel like a mobile fishbowl operator. I'm grateful when people look in, when they pretend not to notice the glass, but I'm fragile too, and overly sentimental.
For at least an evening in late August, the most beautiful woman I've ever, ever seen, in person, worked at the local Bed, Bath, and Beyond. For whatever reason, it didn't register on her face, as it does with most women, that I'm a goon, and that I should not get the wrong idea. For the unusual kindness of sparing me that pursed, grimacing, clenched service-worker smile--nobody owes me anything--I expressed my deep gratitude, by showing no sign of it. These modern ironies.
I have a new appreciation for the oddly idiomatic expression "in person." To meet someone in person, in a body, touchable, rather than merely of person, perhaps. I know no one in my new, small town, and I can no longer meet people as I did in the past, through music, sports, or once upon a time, church. Aside from my ex wife or her parents, with whom I chat when I visit my sons, I only speak in person when I order coffee, or when I say uh-huh to someone asking me, Did you find everything alright?
Right now, my sons seem to use the same word for ball and for book and it's strange to feel more camaraderie with them than anyone else. They're the only ones I really talk to. It feels really important to tell them things they cannot possibly understand--that I love them, that I think they do an amazing job of being 18 months old, and that I miss them so much when I am not there.
My online 'relationships' have an outsized reality to them. More of my heart goes to digital representations than to flesh and bone. A blonde woman on a motorcycle reminds me of Necia, even though I've never seen Necia on a motorcycle. A big smile makes me think of Claire's avatar. I wonder what Michael would think of an article in The Atlantic. Something about Mark Ruffalo seems to suggest Marc Bodnick, or vice-versa. When my closest friend on Quora, the one I openly messaged with, deactivated her account, it affected my actual life. I miss her. Even when I think of people I know from real life, the images in my head come from their Facebook accounts.
Dying alone is the least of my concerns. The internet joke about people pairing up so they won't die alone is completely lost on me. Living alone, the thing that actually matters, isn't funny at all.
Nothing new ever happens to me, so becoming alone is always the most recent thing that happened. The past [the short version: religious, poor health » married » got medication » built a career » pregnant » drugs stopped working » twins » wife left, moved away » I followed, still sick, having lost religion and thus the majority of my friends] is available for endless scrutiny. I should have planned better. I should also stop thinking about that. Nothing new has happened for me to think about.
My dreams have no new characters. Most nights I dream that my wife has decided to leave me.
I don't understand why isolated people become shooters, and I don't understand why I don't understand. I should probably be bitter, right? I worry that my lack of bitterness betrays a terrible complacency. I should feel a global schadenfreude, but all I feel is heartbreaking hope for the world. I yearn for people to enjoy their youth and their health. I celebrate their successes and suffer their losses. Even my ex, in an exclusive relationship only six months after our divorce, I feel happy and worried for.
I can't tell the difference anymore, between solipsism and its exact opposite. In many ways the world seems unreal, like it's my dream. My once natural sense of connection to what happens when I'm not around is now a mythological one. I'm part of us, or we are all an illusion. We are all each other, I hope.
I don't want to be a writer, but life wants me to be one. This is an embarrassing question to have such a detailed answer for. But, right now, writing it is my only way of carving Adam was here into the tree. And I have no guarantees that my sons will always know me. This is also a letter to them. Maybe a bad one, but I was here.
I understand the 'coming out' paradigm better. People feel a need to be "out," explicitly, about their sexuality or their mental health or their past. It's not much different with total isolation, except that part of me feels like maybe people shouldn't talk about it. Illogical shame.
This is me, trying to be out.
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