“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
When you are sad, everyone wants to make you smile. When you can’t smile, they want to make you talk. And when you can’t talk, they want to make you listen—anything to keep you from feeling what you feel.
They mean well. Their hearts are in the right place, mostly. They love you, and they think if they can pull you away from what’s hurting you, that is exactly what you need to feel better. But it’s the greatest hindrance to healing you can offer.
Other times, when people try to help, it’s not about love—it’s about their own discomfort. Your sadness triggers something in them that they can’t face. Your pain reminds them of something buried inside themselves, something they have worked hard to avoid. To allow you to work through your pain would remind them of what they haven’t had the courage to do. So, they quiet what is in them by quieting what is in you. Your distraction is their distraction.
And we are too happy to let them do it. The pain of what we are going through is heavy and at times unbearable. If you can’t soothe it you will search for anything to stop it, and there are endless ways to escape—through people, through work, through staying busy, through substances, through dissociation, by hurting ourselves, by chasing pleasure, by numbing it all away. But distraction isn’t the same as healing. It only delays the inevitable.
Avoidance isn’t just unhealthy; it’s ultimately impossible. What we bury never stays buried for long. In the deep, dark, damp soil of your heart and psyche, pain feeds and festers. It creeps along, growing like slime mold, silently, secretly searching for relief. It works its way into the cracks of the ways you think and behave. It thickens, coating the way you speak, the way you love, the way you move through the world.
You remedy it the best that you can. You scrape away what’s visible by pretending, manipulating, and lying. But the pain runs deep. You have to get to the roots before they take hold, or the hurt will only follow you from home to home, job to job, relationship to relationship. There is no running. There is no rest.
Too often, we don’t know how to feel our emotions. We don’t understand them, don’t know how to name them, don’t know how to sit with them. From infancy, we’re taught to stop crying, to repress our anger, and to put our hurt aside until we are old enough to earn the right to feel. And all that time, what do we do? We turn away from what is in us and chase pleasures to feel better.
We come to where we are now and we hardly know ourselves. We can’t fathom what we are made of because we haven’t faced who we have become and how. Solitude forces you to stop running. It asks: Who am I, really? What am I carrying? What have I been too afraid to let in or let out? And when all the distractions—the people, the pleasure, the power—are stripped away, what is left?
I used to hate being alone. I wasn’t someone I wanted to be alone with. There were too many hurts waiting to rise to the surface. My past threatened to creep in when the present got too quiet. I feared my shame would swallow me up or, worse, that my rage would consume me. I did everything I shouldn’t do to avoid facing myself. But avoidance only led to more trouble, more shame, and more hurt.
For me, it began with, little by little, allowing moments of stillness into my day. A minute in the day when I would pause for a quiet breath. Admitting something to myself that was hard to hear. A short journal entry before bed. And when the painful memories, the intrusive thoughts, the raging impulses came I little them stay just a moment longer than the last time.
Learning to sit with discomfort, to witness pain without running from it, takes time. But little by little, you build resilience to yourself. You realize that no feeling is final. No emotion will destroy you. They hurt, yes, but only as much as we let them fester.
As it got easier, I could listen more in all those secret, forgotten places. I followed the thick roots of my hurt—first without judgment, then with empathy. And in listening, I started to see that so much of what hurt in me wasn’t my fault.
Emotions aren’t failures. They don’t come to harm us; they come to be healed. Solitude is where you give yourself what was missing, and it has to be you. No one can face you for you. No one can heal what is broken in you but you. No one can come between you and the reckoning you must have with yourself.
The most anyone can do is see us off at the start, and then both sides have to let go. This is hard to accept. When we love someone, we wish we could take their hurt away and carry them to the end where they are whole and healed. And when we are on the hard journey to the hardest parts of ourselves, we want someone to reassure us, to make it all okay. But the help we can offer one another is so often less than either side hopes.
When you love someone, you do not take their solitude away. You do not rush them out of their pain or distract them from their hurt. When you love someone, you must hold their solitude as something sacred, even if they can’t yet.
You may stand near, but not in the way. You may encourage them to keep moving, but you cannot carry them along the path. You let them do what only they can do—work out who they are so they can begin again.
We do this for each other, but true healing has to begin with us alone.
Lisa Marie Blair 