This essay is being adapted into a script for a video essay! Stay tuned!
Does independence create loneliness? Or does loneliness create independence?
After my parents divorced when I was starting middle school, my mom took on this “Fiercely Independent” Attitude. She was an immigrant, coming over from the smoldering remains of the Soviet Union to build a new life in the United States. She was 19 or 20 at the time, almost the same age as I am now. Her fierce independence helped her establish her life, and somewhereabouts 15 years later, here she was at this point in her life again: on her own, with 2 kids, building up a new life for herself. She poured all her time into starting her own business, a bakery, and ran it for 5 years with this “Fiercely Independent” attitude. I think there’s a bravery in being on your own like that, one that I am now experiencing as I explore a new country on my own.
I remember one day, as I was helping my mom at the bakery after school, my mom told me how she felt like she didn’t have many friends anymore. One of her friends had just moved her family up north, another friend fell apart with her after some disagreements that I didn’t pay close attention to, other friends got busy with their jobs or their family. Here she was, spending her time at her business that she (Sometimes literally) built brick-by-brick. The only people she spent time with is my brother and I, and her other employees of the bakery. I think now that I have distance and more perspective, I understand the same loneliness that comes from being independent like that.
I have another friend, a former professor of mine, who left the states around the same time I did. She went abroad for her research project and we’ve been messaging back and fourth about our experiences away from home. This friend is well traveled, has visited many corners of the world, and I think it’s important to mention that she’s a generation older than my mom. Our journeys and support networks also look a little different. Her trip is for a few months, while mine is for an indefinite amount of time. She has a spouse, her dogs, and a home to come back to, my fallback option is to couch surf with a few friends while rebuilding my life if I need to come back. Despite all this, I still feel like we’re sharing the same feelings. We’re both traveling away from our homes to learn more about the world and ourselves, a task that could be considered as a “Fiercely independent” one, and we both feel lonely. (Put a pin in this, we’ll come back to her)
My first real experience with independence/loneliness was when I moved to uni. I missed my friends, but being surrounded by so many people my age, I made new ones, even if I struggled at first. My independence allowed me to discover my gender identity that I had been repressing for 18 years of my life. 4 years later, I think that first taste of freedom came with a hollow loneliness, not one of missing friends, but one of not feeling connected with anyone, like I was in my own little bubble. It’s definitely not the same kind of loneliness I’m feeling now. I don’t feel hollow anymore, I know that I have friends that love me and care for me, but they’re a continent, 3 time zones, and a hemisphere away from me. It’s painfully stark how different those types of loneliness are, despite the feeling of independence persisting throughout.
Is independence the same as free will? I don’t have an answer to that, but as I was planning out my move, I felt this surge of energy and power that makes those two things feel intertwined. I was Using My Free Will to Make a Decision To Live My Life In A Different Way and Be Independent. The ironic thing is, that time period leading up to the move was some of the least independent time of my life! I relied so much on my found family to help me sort out my things, organize my life, get ready for the move, sell my car, pack, take me to the airport, everything! I relied on my friends who had traveled before for advice and insight on how to live abroad. I felt myself lose my inhibitions when it came to social situations, I didn’t care what people thought of me, I’d be gone in a few weeks, so f*ck em! I’m My Own Fiercely Independent Woman Who Only Relied On Her Friends And Everyone In Her Life To Become…. more Independent? Does that… really make any sense?
Once I got here, I felt like everything became really silent. There were sounds of the city; cars passing by, strangers speaking in a language that I could barely understand, ambient noise everywhere, but the sounds of my friend’s laughter wasn’t there. I could text, call, play games with my friends, but there was nothing that quite filled the void of being in the warm presence of people who love me. . I can steer the ship of my life however I want. I can bring my own suffering and a new kind go misery, but the experience as a whole is teaching me a new kind of independence. I don’t have anyone who I can REALLY rely on here, not the way I could back home. That’s bound to change but it sucks in the meantime.
The question remains. Does independence create loneliness? Or does loneliness create independence?
The friend and former professor I mentioned earlier wrote to me “I’m discovering the extent to which I need — or believe that I need — a certain amount of close proximity to feel okay. And this distance is shining a light on some of where/how I have perhaps not been as grounded in myself as I thought I was.” Reading this made me think about the 2 types of loneliness I’ve felt; hollow loneliness, and distant loneliness. Before, I was feeling ungrounded in the sense that I didn’t feel like I had a support network. Now, I’m feeling ungrounded in the sense that I have a support network, but this path that I’m on requires re-learning how to live my life as an independent person. Thinking about that broke down the barrier between hollow lonely and distant lonely. I am distant from my friends now. It is unfair for me to ask them to value me as close as they value the people that are physically there with them. That makes me feel hollow, like I’m right there back at square one, feeling like I have no network, no connections, no friends. But then she wrote “On some of my crummier days [here], I have had these maudlin moments if thinking ‘I could die in this stupid apartment and no one would find me for days because I don’t matter to anyone enough for them to think about me” (She followed it up with “Can you imagine my Princess Drama Ego in all of that? Lol”) Reading that was a stark reminder of the depressive episodes I’ve had over the last several years, When I was living in a single dorm room and felt exactly that. If I stopped showing up to classes, how long would it take before people got worried? A week? 2 weeks? I would later find out, as I dropped out of college, that it would be much less time than that. What if that happened here? Would my friends back home even notice if I stopped messaging for a week?
“I think maybe this is a journey about mattering. And examining what it means for me to matter.” Independence does’t create loneliness, but loneliness doesn’t create independence either. The two are intertwined in a way that is impossible for our feeble human minds to distinguish. What really matters in all of this is that we matter. My mom in her loneliest moments confided in me, because I mattered to her and she mattered to me. Maybe it’s not important that I am a continent away from my friends, because whether I’m there or not, I still matter to them, even if I have trouble internalizing that sometimes. And lastly, that former professor was the first person from my university who reached out to me after I dropped out. Despite not being her student anymore, despite having other students and other friends. She showed me that I still matter, even if I wasn’t able to thrive in that environment. I wouldn’t be in this country right now if I hadn’t dropped out of college. I wouldn’t be in this country right now if I didn’t have support from all my friends in my life. I wouldn’t be in this country right now without my mom showing me what “Fierce independence” looks like. So does the difference between independence and loneliness really matter when you matter?
YES! LONELINESS F*CKING SUCKS!? IT’S NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN REASON YOUR WAY OUT OF. IT IS A SOUL CRUSHING FEELING THAT TAKES YOU TO THE DARKEST PLACES YOU WILL EVER KNOW.
End of part one. Join us next time as we discuss dependence, the toxic side of being independent, and how it might explain some of the fascistic cruelty we’re seeing in the United States right now.
