Loneliness As A Language

An online journal entry on how loneliness shapes those who carry complexity

Abbie Tanner on Unsplash

There are so many layers to myself, that every day, I meet new parts of me, some that even feel contradictory or oppositional to the layers I uncovered previously.

That’s why the question of, Who are you, is one I can never answer decisively or confidently. I’m perplexing, even to myself. And maybe that’s why I have always felt lonely my whole life. I’ve known that the things I want aren’t things that everybody else wants, that the way I feel about things isn’t really how most do.

I remember sharing with a then old lover about my perpetual sadness. They were dumbfounded. And, to their credit, they didn’t try to feign understanding. Instead, they frankly said, “I have bad days, but I’d be lying if I ever said they made it hard for me to get out of bed. Or if I ever had the kind of sadness that was all-consuming and made me incapable of still showing up for my life.”

Right then, I saw what I’ve always known: I am different. The weight of existing? Of the world? It’s much heavier for me than it is for most.

And here’s the thing: items that don’t fit into boxes are often discarded. The world doesn’t quite know what to do with those who are hard to categorize. It is much easier if you are something that can be cut into smaller pieces, something less heavy and more convenient to carry. I’ve realized that those who cannot be made into smaller parts, those who refuse to be easy or straightforward, are often left to navigate the world alone.

Some say our difference is our gift to the world, but what is the world’s gift to us? Why are we carriers of gifts that don’t feel like gifts?

I have always felt this fundamental loneliness, one I’ve been aware cannot be eased with more company or deeper love. It’s the kind of isolation that roots itself in the fact that this world wasn’t made for me and I wasn’t made for it. I find myself holding parts of me back, not because I don’t want to share them, but because I fear they would go unrecognized, like speaking a language no one else understands.

And perhaps loneliness is a language.

Languages, in their purest form, are meant to connect, to communicate, to allow for the exchange of thoughts, feelings, and meaning. But what happens when the language you speak is one only you understand? When your loneliness becomes a mother tongue, something so deeply embedded in your experience of the world that it isolates you, even as you try to connect?

Loneliness becomes a language of contradictions. To speak loneliness fluently is to understand that not everyone will hear you, and even fewer will understand you. It is to communicate in a way that feels as though it reverberates back only to yourself.

Loneliness is the way some of us are forced to interact with the world when the world cannot meet us where we are. And in that isolation, in that solitary dialogue, we’re left to wonder: do we carry the burden of complexity, or is it carrying us?

I have never known what to do when my relationships accentuate how different I am.

Why are you so complicated, Katz?

I often ask myself.

Why can’t you be a straight line?

I have yearned to be something simpler, and easier to grasp. But instead, I tend to be a contortion, twisted into shapes that never seem to settle into something that fits into the existing moulds of the world.

So I write for us—those who feel alone in the way we are wired. For those who move through the world feeling like misfits, constantly negotiating spaces where we don’t quite belong. I write for those of us who feel like the world is inhabitable and that navigating it feels like stumbling into walls that remind us how out of place we are.

But maybe, just maybe, in this emotional inaccessibility—where the world can’t reach us and we can’t quite reach it—there is a kind of freedom. A freedom to explore those layers without the pressure of making them palatable for others.

Maybe being perplexing, even to ourselves, is an invitation to expand rather than be constrained—to become fluent in the hidden corners of the human experience that the world has yet to understand. And in gaining this proficiency, we not only make space for ourselves but create a pathway for others like us, offering a new language for those who have always existed in the margins.

We then also remember that language, after all, does not contort or dilute itself for the ease of tongues that do not know it. It remains whole, in all its intricacies, waiting for those willing to learn it.

And in that, loneliness as a language becomes not just a burden but a way of being that carries its own gravity.

Because when we speak in loneliness, we learn to speak ourselves into existence.

In solitude, but not alone,

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