It's Better To Be Lonely

I was banking on being more successful socially in college than I was in high school. Nobody got me in high school. I was goofy and weird and had too much energy for the wrong things. I had no taste for alcohol and no money or desire for drugs. Surely college would be better, I thought. Surely in college I would be able to find people to be my friends.

Yeah, not so much. Maybe it was because I was a full year younger than everybody else. Maybe it was because I had missed orientation. Maybe it was because I had no taste for the alcohol, no money or desire for the drugs, and no self-loathing required for the sexual musical chairs that almost everyone else was playing.

Maybe it was because I'd already met my true love at fifteen and he lived three hundred miles away and I was perpetually low grade sad.

Maybe it was because I was goofy and weird with my penchant for Kate Bush and drawing doodley pictures of faeries. I could never get past the irony police. They were everywhere in the late eighties.

I was lonely most of the time. I was not usually tempted to do the things that would make me not lonely, at least temporarily. Yet I did have the hollow and scary feeling that I would be lonely forever. That loneliness would be my lot.

I had two friends in college who didn't mind living with me. They even liked me. They were Laura and Evan, a beautiful couple in love since the first day of orientation. They were generous and brilliant and stylish. I loved them and we lived together for two years before they fled to Leeds to finish college. I was lonely when they left but they wrote letters and postcards and sent me black and white photographs of candles they lit in cathedrals just for me.

Laura and Evan are two of my most important friends still. They graduated, got married, built lives based on family and art and music and love. I graduated college, earned a teaching credential, married that true love soulmate. I made many more beautiful, sparkling and inspiring friends and I've also built a life on love. As for everyone else I knew in college, we're not even facebook friends. It doesn't feel like any kind of loss.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my seventeen-year-old self that I wouldn't be lonely forever. In fact, someday I would be so surrounded by love that sometimes I'd wish for solitude. Just a little bit of it.

But I can't do that so instead I say to my former students who are struggling to make their way as authentic and sparkling individuals in the gooey morass that is the social scene in most college dorms: It's better to be lonely than surrounded by jerks. My dad told me this when I was young and it was helpful. It released me from the responsibility of trying to make friends with people who were always drunk or high or who just wanted to have sex with me.

It really was better to be lonely. Because lonely doesn't last forever. Loneliness is in fact a good thing because it creates a great sucking vacuum which will (if it hasn't already) absolutely attract friends like Laura and Evan who will buoy you and inspire you and bring out your best self. Hold out for those friends.

They might be closer than you think.