Don't despair. Okay, don't despair anymore.
One, it's natural to be alone what is unnatural is to be in despair about it. What our society doesn't teach and display in the media is that we all spend some of our adult years single. Hopefully in that time you're developing yourself.and doing some fun things and interesting things and dynamic things about yourself, for yourself. In my twenties I remember a roommate who was so desperate for men/a boyfriend that he was attacked, used, abused and eventually tossed out as a roommate. And I remember relating to the desire on some level but not that deeply. I felt interest in dating and occasionally lonely and bewildered at how to socialize in the big city but I knew I wasn't at that extreme.
So I got a life.
I went through the internet and newspapers and would just show up at places---meetings. I once even crashed a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting---it was really a depressing group but it was my secret funny in my head wild night out. I discovered on the internet meetings in public spaces around the city and went to some of those. Discussions on the Greece financial meltdown were fascinating with a dozen people even when I wasn't quite sure what the Lithuanian financial wiz was explaining. I joined not one, but two men's groups. I sat in one group for weeks even helping to lick and send out their newsletter to a thousand people just to get out in the world. I took real estate classes at Pace and threw myself a glorious birthday party on 7th Avenue at a restaurant (Pennyfeathers) sending out invitations that told people to give me candles, incense or book gift cards as gifts (and they did!). I went online and created a wham bam slamming profile on Yahoo Personals and charged forward to date 100 men in a year's time. I did. It was like a marathon of Sex and The City. I went to the movies by myself at least once a week and one time on a dare went to a bar or nightclub every night for a week, even when I had to work early the next day.
I got a life by experimenting and playing and trying things out and wandering into odd places and making new friends (some I still have a decade later, others who got left in that time tunnel) but I refused to ponder my loneliness. I recently joined an entrepreneurial mastermind group and besides my normal education and law classes I took a video/film editing class, an environmental certification, volunteered at a children's after school program and helped start a same gender loving men's group on campus. I am currently eyeing a church up the way that says in a huge sign it needs volunteers for it's GED program. Not my faith, not even my language but what a better way to improve my Spanish, eh?
I go to museums with friends, mentor geniuses and knuckleheads, scour Goodwill stores for books and try to go out for one alcoholic drink a week at a local bar---where they know my name! My close friends will tell you I'm good for calling up and inviting people out to dinner on me! Generosity battles away slumpadumps!
Loneliness is defeated by generosity and activity.
I read books, ordering like Croesus on Amazon and then awaiting phone texts that my package has arrived. The other day I threw all sense of cholesterol caution to the wind and bought myself a porterhouse steak that was so thick I cooked it then had to microwave it halfway through eating because it was so massive. Just for me. Just a steak Monday treat for no good damn reason.
Loneliness treats one's self badly, love treats itself well.
I go to the gym---ok, I'm not a happy gym person, I'm not all about let's chat and bond over the Stairmaster but the other night I was huffing and puffing and whisper singing along with Deborah Cox then Natalie Cole then Luther Vandross then Alicia Keys for 45 minutes on the treadmill. Got those endorphins up then walked back home with a proud Kool Aid smile.
For about eight years now I've had a secret weapon in my arsenal for getting stuff done in life, I exercise. I'm convinced that there's something connected to moving our bodies that moves us in the universe that makes our lives move and shift physically and spiritually. Maybe it just wakes up the body and mind or maybe extra exertion in the Universe moves us metaphysically.
Loneliness is about disconnect from the Universe.
I go and I tape several episodes of The Kyle Phoenix Show, I facilitate a group on Fridays, I spend at least 4 hours editing and taping and refining fill ins and videos and going through the wonderful comments and suggestions people send me. I watch Shark Tank. I take one day, no guilt to just sleep, to allow myself to luxuriate in resting, in the pillows, in the comforters, in the breeze and the silence. I rent and watch extremely not smart nor always good movies from Blockbuster for $1 a day----and I laugh. Middle of the night, I was laughing at Madagascar 3 which is like some sort of animalistic halcyon trip about animals, French cops, inter-species romances, trapeze, lubricants and ideology and liberation, enacting power. It's a mess. It's deep. The hippo is wearing a tutu with a thong. It's very strange at the exact same time.
When you're living as much as you can, you become attractive to the Universe, to it's participants and they call you, they text you, they chat you up, they ask you out to dinner. I'm an only child so I rarely feel lonely because I appreciate that I am alone, even when surrounded by a dozen people I know and love. I am still the only entity in this body. But I can share that inner being as much as possible and I can dance by myself on 145th waiting for the bus to Me'Shell Ndegeocello and I can speed into a supermarket and audibly sigh out loud that pumpkin pies are in!!!!!!
And when I do all of the above, when I launch myself into life, the moments of loneliness I may experience, I can see them and realize---oh, that's going to pass or I need to fill that space or it's time to call someone up and invite them out to dinner on me or sometimes it's as simple as treating myself to a movie in a theater to offset choosing to be lonely, instead of simply being joyously aware, loving, conscious and present in being alone....for the moment.
Thank you!
Kyle Phoenix
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Awesome.
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