Aloneness

Contradictory statistics on this blog’s infrastructure page cause me confusion about my readership.  Per-month stats are robust and encouraging, while day/week stats are dismal.  There is no way the two sets of numbers could ever coincide at month’s end (vampirestat and other robot hits disappeared long ago), though I’m too lackadaisical to actually check.  For certain reasons, I’ve chosen to believe the scantiest numbers, and this leaves me rethinking the nature and purpose of my writing.

I will probably begin creating more introspective stuff, less geared toward objective psychological subjects such as ADHD, feeling-centered therapy, tics, etc.  If this is sad or disappointing to any readers, I won’t know it, because I don’t know if you are there.

The primary purpose for writing introspectively will be future nostalgia, my museum in the mind.  There is a personal story told by Ray Bradbury, great writer of poetic science fiction.  Well into his fame, Ray took a trip back to his boyhood home – Waukegan, Illinois – the setting of many stories including the semi-magical autobiography Dandelion Wine.  He walked the old neighborhood to his old house and came upon a tree that struck a memory.  Maybe now middle-aged, he climbed the tree and found, somehow still stashed in a crevice, a note he had written in the cosmic blush of little boyhood.  Reading it, he cried.  “I remember you,” the note said – implication or clear message being that the young and prescient child was addressing his future self with fondness, some ineffable boy-wonder’s feeling for his old, far away and lonelier self.

That’s what I will do, though without the childhood.

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An old friend of mine worries about leaving a legacy.  I’ve never had any such concerns, assuming that at my end I will blink out unknown (except to my wife), with no ripple in the world, and that this is right.  I don’t know if that is wiser and more mature, or sicker and less mature than wanting a legacy.

Certain people come to counseling with the problem of social awkwardness, ineptness, fear or aversion: They are not comfortable with others.  Some, as teens, don’t really make friends as much as they find affirmations of alienation to talk at, a musical mood they are most comfortable in.  I have long fought or dealt with that incongruity with the world, and have “used” clients the way the awkward teen uses his faux-friends as musical ambience, but also as a means to be the most human I can be.  I know what it is to feel originally, deeply, at core out-of-sync with the world of people, probably even with the world of nature.  Therapy brings connection, which I know I have used well to help others.

Those most alienated are, of course, those who needed to be one with, melt into, the world and another person.  Some basic babyhood immersion in an all-loving, all-protective carrier did not happen, leaving the person one magnet lonely for the other and opposite one.  When a young man, in session, defines “love” to me, while thinking of his steady girlfriend whom he’s only met online: “You immerse yourself in their life and they immerse their self in yours,” he is unknowingly talking about the first sustenance that never happened, leaving him to walk the world scalded, bleeding out and converting these truths to the feeling “love-hope.”  The other boy who has owned the alienation, made it his philosophy, is hardly any different, really no different at all.  They both look at another person and are embattled, inside, not to collapse into the infant who has no words, only sounds, clinging, need.  This internal battle – forced to be in the present but really being in the past – is what makes him inept.

Somewhere between this aloneness carried inside, and aloneness at the end of life, it would be nice to have a fusion with love or some universal mother.  We combat or numb ourselves to this absence with present love, disappearance of Self (orgasm or “la petite mort,” moments of wonder, obliteration of consciousness by floods of experience or adrenalin).  I mostly settle for small moments of immersion in accidental ideas that build on themselves – the writing.  Le petit blog.