Loneliness

I identify, Robert.  I often feel more alone at work, surrounded by people who are ignoring me, than I do at home on my own.  School was the same, too.

It's funny, too, how small things can catch me out.  After my divorce, I got on with my life quite well.  Although I still felt love for my ex-wife, whom I no longer had any contact with, I felt more settled as a single person.  One day about 6 months later, thinking of nothing in particular, I was driving with Classic FM on.  Suddenly, a piece of music came on that we'd had played at our wedding: Faure's 'Cantique de Jean Racine.'  On impulse, I switched it off.  Then I had to pull over.  I was in bits.

13 years later - last Saturday, in fact - I was going through YouTube, as I often do, looking for nice music to play.  I happened upon Annie Lennox's 'No More I Love Yous'.  This was a song I'd played a lot in the year after my divorce - usually when I'd had a few drinks - and would invariably end up in tears.  Now, in the light of no longer having my mum, it takes on an extra poignancy.  I played it... and was soon in tears.  It occurred to me that there really is no one left on earth to say 'I love you' to me - or even just to think it. 

I mainly work from home these days, which is better by far than being subcontracted to a company to work. But there is still a school where I work and that can be isolating. It might be because of the difference in language and culture though, alongside the fact that I have a part-time status that means I don't have to stay on the premises and attend meetings. That latter is no loss because I loathe meetings!

I wish things could have been different regarding my own school days, especially at secondary school. 

My Dad died a couple of years ago too and my mother is now in a home, after a stroke that seemed to bring on full-on dementia overnight. It did not take long after that for other family members to continue the tradition of casting me in the role of black sheep and blaming me for everything though. 

It can certainly be hard to find people on some kind of wavelength, though there are one or two. I am still in touch with some of the old artist friends from a community we had in the UK. Others are dead though, one jumped off a train way back, another died soon after my Dad after drinking herself to death. 

In the art world here, things have opened up as many creatives have got sick of the closed doors here. I find it is a question of checking to see what kind of agendas other people may have and what sort of hidden snobberies and projections. Apart from the summer, most of the time the day job leaves me too exhausted to want to meet new people much anyway. 

I used to lament loneliness massively. There can be all sorts of reasons for it. At least three people important to me pinpointed one factor - we did not fit in because of a class thing. You can be talented, you can be educated up to degree level, but if your family is essentially working class, you will not really fit into a more middle-class culture. Certainly in one town that was very bourgeois, I was never happy there and always felt a bit pitied and patronised - that is what all these nice people do when they are pleased with themselves - then I moved to a city with a different culture - it was much easier to feel more in a level with other people there. 

There was one girl at my uni who was full of 'helpful' advice, telling me if I wanted to fit in I should be more conventional and look at least approximately in the direction of the person talking to me. 

Nowadays I am inclined to think there are worse things than loneliness - drinking from poison wells. I mean toxic people. Mind games, full of ego and unstated agendas. I will not have anyone look down on and pity me now for seemingly being on the outside, I have standards too!

I think loneliness is not so much being alone, it can be about the need to find the right kind of people 

I used to lament loneliness massively. There can be all sorts of reasons for it. At least three people important to me pinpointed one factor - we did not fit in because of a class thing. You can be talented, you can be educated up to degree level, but if your family is essentially working class, you will not really fit into a more middle-class culture. Certainly in one town that was very bourgeois, I was never happy there and always felt a bit pitied and patronised - that is what all these nice people do when they are pleased with themselves - then I moved to a city with a different culture - it was much easier to feel more in a level with other people there. 

There was one girl at my uni who was full of 'helpful' advice, telling me if I wanted to fit in I should be more conventional and look at least approximately in the direction of the person talking to me. 

Nowadays I am inclined to think there are worse things than loneliness - drinking from poison wells. I mean toxic people. Mind games, full of ego and unstated agendas. I will not have anyone look down on and pity me now for seemingly being on the outside, I have standards too!

I think loneliness is not so much being alone, it can be about the need to find the right kind of people 

Boris Johnson sounds like he is on the spectrum. The sociopathic one. 

Well said.  As for the class thing, I agree.  Money, power, the right connections, etc.  Look at the case with Boris Johnson, when he set fire to some restaurant toilets as a 'jolly jape' in his Bullingdon Club days at Oxford.  Wheels turned behind the scenes and the matter was dropped, and he was allowed to continue with his studies.  Anyone else, not so connected, would have gone to prison for arson, criminal damage, public endangerment, etc.  Been marked for life.

I'm working class.  My family is working class.  Unfortunately, some of them have a social climbing agenda, and have essentially turned their backs on their roots.  I wish they could see how they don't quite fit with aping their 'betters'.  Their class status is all demonstrated through property and possessions.  Nothing else.  The 'nouveau riche'. 

As for me - I've long felt psychologically displaced.  I was born in a vibrant working class neighbourhood in London.  It's now Millionaires Row.  The same with the Devon market town where I spent my teens.  Hardly a native voice is heard there now.  It's more like Richmond-upon-Thames.  It feels like there's nowhere left to go here anymore.  I'll never understand concepts like 'national pride'.  I just happen to have been born here.  I don't really know the place now.  I'd like to go somewhere where the social ethos is different.  More inclusive.  At least then, even if I'm alone, I'll feel I'm in a congenial environment.

Agree, too, about toxic people.  I find it very hard to differentiate people sometimes.  I never really trust anyone.  It's probably the safest way.  The only person I ever implicitly trusted - it went without question - was my mother.  Now... I trust my cat!  She never lets me down!