AI's got nothing on a woman's loneliness

out: optimization. in: the void in my heart

Most of loneliness has already been spoken and rewritten, from Plato to Plath, so not much is left for the rest of us thinkers to mull over. I was young, talkative and running around with bruised knees, with a newfound love for diagonally sliced sandwiches, when I realized there is a war being waged on my sense of belonging. That icky, gooey, strange feeling that tickles your throat when you’re the last girl, fashionably and in height, to be picked for volleyball, or when you overhear the details of a sleepover you weren’t present for. Like a paper boat, it fills up with water and sinks down to the pit of your stomach. The feeling told me it was here to stay, and it was soft enough in its embrace of my unwanted parts to let it linger.

from are.na

It wasn’t all bad, of course. Loneliness could be balanced out with a hug, parental tough love, sometimes with a cup of OJ with some pulp – but, in the end, the boat would float back into my harbor, anchor itself politely. It followed me into all sorts of milestones and graduations, disappointments and revivals. It followed me into meeting rooms where I had to count minutes, one foot eager and the other already gone, into dinners where my instinctual overcompensation in response to slightly dirty –but mostly exaggerated by my paranoia– looks gave away my tryhard architecture. Into the cab, throwing my head back. Did you know gravity had tear-reversing properties?

It was never a question of whether there was something wrong with me. I knew there must be. I could never explain it properly either, because it’s not an ailment but a structurally invisible flaw: I can make small talk. I work hard. I can shut up and be good. I’m not offended. It wasn’t personal, sure. They’re just busy. It’s just a job. He’s just a guy. Things happen. But all these learned relief slogans come to me at a degree of labor so unlawful, they leave bullet holes. I go home and rethink everything I said that day, and then struggle to fall asleep until I remember my importance probably doesn’t advance in parallel to my misery. The only thing left to negotiate is the devotion to my unfixable nature, whether the threshold of too far gone to rewire has been reached, just how much I want to cling to this brokenness. Vanquished, I built a shrine to being understood someday, if not as a passive verb then as a distant dream, someplace I’d finally exhale.

When I think of loneliness and its shapes and forms, it helps to give her a name and a face and a slip dress she wears around the house. She’s a seductress, velvet gloves on. She sits down expecting nothing, hurls a big sigh at me because I’ve been resisting her arrival again, asking if I’m here all alone tonight. ‘I am,’ I say.

I say I’m at last perfectly desirable, a product of Hollywood sorrow and all the attributes a woman needs to be an object of fixation in a non-offensive way, something easy on the eye like a beige couch, but that doesn’t make it hurt less, didn’t make me better with words or on the stairmaster. All this pain, I tell her, has been compacted into a small frame that never thinks of itself as small enough. I was alone when I was five and I’m alone today, and I just don’t get why she likes to follow me around.

I think January, how the light in our faces dims when our jokes don’t land. I think about receiving a text defying expectations, a short “OK” in response to a warranted, bleeding paragraph, especially when the sender had been typing for a good five minutes. Where do erased messages go to die? Do they lay dormant in our conscious, clogging the empathy arteries, adjusting history? I think about crashing out in hopes for an apology only to be met with resistance, prompting me to apologize instead, not fully understanding how I’d just turned the tables on myself, but I say sorry anyway. I think the Subway zoomed-in tomato wall decor, my mom’s misunderstanding of who I’ve been, that grief and resentment go together like my favorite earrings. I think about the gap between being loved and understood, and that the gap is self-made, drawn out in circles and filled with sea salt, because we don’t let anyone crawl into our head and stay there long enough to get it, but we expect them to. We feel this gap every day, forever.

I think about being spoken to like a child, remarks so thinly veiled and merely alluding to my lack of expertise, that if I were to complain it’d be my exaggeration cross to bear. I think about a name that grinds my gears. The whole ‘wise beyond your years’ shtick really gets tired and tested hard, tightened like a guitar string. The elasticity of maturity can only last so long, and there isn’t enough collagen in my body to make them all shut up and understand we’re fighting the same battle, that my youth is not a threat but scaffolding holding my fragile bones together. I think about dissociating to the sounds of a conversation so unforgivingly beneath me, then feeling bad that I would interpret anything as ‘beneath’ me —who does she think she is?— but it’s an intrusion I can’t stop.

When I think loneliness, I think about being trapped in a nail salon with the chatter around me, wanting to go home. I think about the time I couldn’t afford a manicure. I think about everything contained under the dome of past shame, past survival, the remnants of what we weren’t allowed to scream. I think about the first time I realized we don’t always do what’s good for us, instead letting the inclination to follow catastrophe take the wheel, orchestrating the choice as some fateful pull when it was merely a decision. Everything in life boils down to a decision or its consequence. I then became more understanding of people’s grey morality, humbled with knowledge my righteousness was just as water-soluble as theirs.

And we can’t help but laugh when our loneliness is reduced to female constitution, our seasickness written off to something like ‘attention seeker.’ Sleeping Beauty is saved by a kiss and a woman is saved by being desired. But here’s where they get it wrong: we want to be saved by inclusion. Womanhood is a lifelong yearning for rendering ourselves compatible with one another, whispering secrets over tin can telephones and clumsily putting lipstick on each other, goosebumps on skin. And listening. Retroactive solace. That happened to you too? Really? Same.

So they barge into our world without understanding our fabric, they weaponize our isolation as if beauty and truth don’t belong together, as if our hunger for belonging is actually thirst for standing out. You know, when you’re hungry, drinking water doesn’t help. If they understood, they wouldn’t sell us peptide lip gloss and foxy facelifts, or consciousness-soothing listicles. If they understood, they wouldn’t come at us with the ‘I can’t believe you’re real’ when it’s not a compliment but yet another reminder that we have never been included, that we would die, for once, to be like all the other girls, that we will empty our pockets for that feeling. That confounds them. What’s being sold is a product of this fatal misunderstanding; they haven’t measured the pace at which we learned to walk alone, haven’t excavated to the start of our survival, an ancient wound. AI’s got nothing on the depth of our loneliness. It’s an intrinsic misunderstanding, a flaw in the system that lives to reproduce and breed itself until we’re running on empty.

Loneliness is a woman: she’s quietly in tune with nuance and doesn’t run around announcing her importance like a man. She knows why I feel so protected in knee-high boots and so damn vulnerable in ballet flats. She understands, without me having to say a word, why I once spent nine hours in the cold transit terminal of Charles de Gaulle when I could’ve gotten a hotel for the night. The same logic once applied to jobs, men, and my wishes. Something about unnecessary sacrifice appeals to loneliness, and I was summoning her. It was an open invitation. I needed a woman beside me, someone to stroke my cheek, and she was my best bet of equal complexity and anguish.

And all this nuance is not for nothing. It teaches me that love isn’t always equipped with unanimous understanding, but that doesn’t color it untrue. A voice note from my mother giggling about nothing in particular doesn’t negate her scolding my attitude. I can be good at small talk and eyeliner and still hide in rogue corners of a big party. I can be looked up to and respected without having done much. I can be sexy and disgusting, have my cake and eat it too.

I am lonely and I will never stop trying not to be, and that doesn’t make me a fool. It makes me a great nuance collaborator. We let our loneliness in, feel her in the food we haven’t eaten and the dreams we haven’t chased, in the photos we haven’t gone back to and the questions we haven’t asked. Distill her into words, then into feelings, and then back into words, and now you’re reading this.

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