Solitude/Loneliness
Triptychs and one egg omelettes
It is hard (good) hard (good) to be alone sometimes.
Being alone is a skill.
Being lonely is inevitable.
Being lonely is somewhat vilified.
Being lonely often feels acute, a state to remedy, a personal failure.
I have a deep and persistent need for solitude, but often when I get it, it feels like loneliness.
I am learning to sit with this.
One evening I get back from the studio, I’m feeling unsettled, tired but sort of in need of companionship. I’ve got the not unfamiliar feeling I seem to keep having which is: wondering where my life went.
I put my things down and set about cooking some dinner. I’m hungry.
I feel unsettled. I listen to some intense dance music as I make cannellini beans in tomato sauce with feta and dill and lemon. As I cut the dill I slice my finger deep on a new, sharp, serrated knife. I cut the side of my nail & some of my left index finger off. I wasn’t concentrating. It bleeds a lot. I find a plaster and put the plaster on it and carry on, feeling strange, feeling lonely. It doesn’t hurt that much but it bleeds through the plaster.
I carry on cooking, listening to the music, moving things quickly around the kitchen, not focusing. Then suddenly I am crying. I don’t completely understand. It is its potency and force quietly shocks me. I don’t relate to it, but it’s happening so I let it happen. I open the door to the garden and sit on a stool, looking at the rain on a raspberry leaf. I roll a cigarette. I feel pathetic.
It’s cold and rainy in July and I’m crying so I open a bottle of very good red wine my friend Zoe bought me for my birthday. Maybe It should be shared on a special occasion, I wonder. Then I think, fuck it, and why not enjoy it by myself if I want it now, which I do.
I open the wine and pour it into a glass. I sip, I cry some more. Sitting by the open door, I realise that I am ashamed to feel lonely, and confused, because this is what I thought I wanted. But I know that aloneness is not a monolith, it contains many shades and that is a lesson in itself.
It is a fine line, both suspended taut and high to walk across and running deep and quiet through the middle.
I eat the beans and dill and drink the wine.
As I eat I type “loneliness” into my Spotify search bar and I find and listen to an episode on loneliness by a podcast called This Jungian Life. It soothes me, listening to three psychoanalysts talk about loneliness so frankly and fluently. I allow myself to cry more, still surprised by it’s relative violence, this unexpected emotional geyser.
This crying is more like funereal wailing than the crying I generally do, which is usually polite or at least fairly quiet. This is more like a tired toddler having a tantrum. It’s embarrassing, even though I’m the only one witnessing it. But I let it happen.
Later when washing up my dinner things, I slice my other index finger on the knife. This makes me extremely upset, and feels as though it compounds something about myself I don’t completely understand. Something to do with aloneness, something to do with inability, something to do with carelessness. I put a plaster on each finger and try to forget about the throbbing in my digits and my head.
I watch a film wrapped in a blanket, listening to the rain on the roof, and put myself to bed. By the morning I feel better.
Being alone takes getting used to, getting into the rhythm can feel very turbulent. If it’s been a long time since I’ve been alone I often realise I have forgotten what I like to do, apart from stare at my phone, which I don’t like to do, I’m just addicted to it. What was the mystical feeling of freedom I was longing for? Did I invent it to be contrary? In the newly attained aloneness everything feels empty, silly, frivolous. It feels like a space has opened up which needs to be filled. It feels like failure, missed opportunity. But I know that it feels worse to feel lonely in company than to be alone.
It’s a process. On my own, when I get going, I do things like perfect my one egg omelette, and sit and eat it staring out the window in the conservatory whilst it rains. On my own, on a good day, the thoughts start to percolate, separate and rise to the top, sometimes random, sometimes formed like perfect little bubbles, bursting clarity onto the surface of my consciousness.
On my own, when I get going, I write very long, expansive lists which have no rhyme or reason, no coherence whatsoever, but serve the purpose I suppose of a free writing exercise. Shopping lists meld with lyrics meld with distant dreams and plans for trips and people I should have gotten back to, or writing I should be doing, or things I want to cook or research.
Time to sit and stare doing nothing.
To fold my clothes which have lain in a steadily accumulating and increasingly unapproachable pile in my room for months on end.
To water the plants. Check the seedlings. To tentatively pick up the guitar and play for fifteen minutes it in an alternate tuning.
To be in silence. I get so tired of talking sometimes.
Sometimes, alone, I do a lot of eating. Eating until I feel stuffed and nauseous.
Sometimes I eat nothing, maybe some cheese on a cracker, sometimes endless cups of herbal tea.
I rarely drink on my own, but sometimes, like the rainy dill knife lonely crying evening, I do. Half a bottle, some scavenged ginger chocolate from the depths of the fridge, then to bed.
This week I am alone in London again, after a full on week of road tripping in Ireland with my best friends, nearly missing my flight back to the UK and playing at a festival the day after all on very little sleep, a lot of Guinness and intense PMT.
I finally got my period on Saturday, drove home on Sunday and this week so far I have been getting used to solitude by:
Cooking alone, solitary fumbling, cycling to the shop, stopping for a coffee, some listening to music, but mostly being quiet. Spending too much money in the well-stocked Budgens in Crofton Park rather than going to Aldi. Cycling home in the rain, feeling free. Unpacking my shopping and putting in on the kitchen table, a squirrel surveying a stockpile.
Sleeping. Taking my phone from myself, take it out of my room. Plugging it in downstairs. I sleep so much better. I try to wait, do some writing, have a tea, some water before I touch it in the morning. I feel so much better. More alone, but less lonely.
Listening to some songs I’ve been recording in the studio over the past few weeks on my speaker.
Watering plants. Wondering what they need.
Getting inspired, entering a kind of flow state for the first time in ages. Thinking about releasing more music. Thinking of a name for the new project. Getting out my collection of driftwood, interesting rocks and my strange yellow ceramic spoon and yellow ceramic duck that Thalia made when she was five- I don’t know why I have it at my house- and the mini silver spoons I bought from Portobello Market when I didn’t have any money and shouldn’t have been buying mini silver spoons but couldn’t help myself and had £10 cash in my purse.
Thinking about Triptychs.
Doing a lot of washing and drying and washing and drying.
Cycling around wondering what to do with myself on a Tuesday afternoon in July. Don’t feel young or old. I think I could ring so and so for a pint, or ask If they would like to come to dinner. But I am still so tired in lots of ways and decide against it.
Watching a documentary about John Galliano- interesting but it also makes me feel horrid about myself. Strange toxic thoughts about weight start to enter my psyche. Fuck the 90’s.
Looking at the garden, the pink roses in the hedge and the little seedlings Ali planted in the raised bed. Feeling a presence and looking up to see that the fox is there, staring directly at me.
Writing morning pages. Allowing the dots of my thoughts to connect. Writing ‘silver moon’ ‘strawberry moon’ ‘harvest moon’ in a list, wondering why I am so obsessed with the moon, or more appropriately perhaps the symbol of the moon. Feeling like a cliche but not stopping myself from writing. ‘Tide pulled by moon’. It continues, like that. Imagery of silver and water I don’t quite fully understand.
Taking magnesium and reading a recipe for seeded crackers in bed with a candle. Listening to the rain. I love the rain. Sleeping a deep and uninterrupted sleep.
Allowing myself to sit with and admit loneliness. To understand that this admission means a deeper, truer wish for genuine connection which I’ve long worried was broken in me. I historically have always been trying to run away. I always feel safest when I’m packing a bag to go to the next place, when something is ending. I realise it’s a cliche but it is unfortunately true. Accepting this uncomfortable feeling is a balm, but it stings as it’s applied.
Random unrelated thought accessed by solitude on a grey Monday spent at home pottering solo:
The ability to access what I want to say about her is sitting somewhere just behind my eyes. Stimulated by reading recipe for mussels mouclade when I should be doing 101 other things on my list, and thinking that I would like to cook mussels mouclade, wondering who for, and then, thinking how she didn’t like Mussels, and then how I miss her, and finally how she is not quite yet gone. Well, finally realising that there are so many things to say as yet inaccessible to me, I do not have the clarity of thought, the skill to execute the recipe. But I have ingredients of quality & provenance: my memories of her.
Nice things:
One egg omelette (trust me)
You need:
One egg
Butter
Hard cheese (Parmesan/vegetarian hard cheese)
Salt
A nice spatula
A Non stick pan
You should:
Break one egg into a bowl, little pinch of salt
Whisk vigorously with a fork
lots of butter, melt in the pan
Pour in egg
Swirl around the pan
Push down the sides with nice spatula
Grate on hard cheese
Don’t overcook it
Flip it gradually with nice spatula into a little pancake like roll
Slide out of pan
More grated hard cheese
Maybe a little more salt
Enjoy with a black coffee (if you want). Honestly believe me, you only need one egg. That’s six one egg omelettes in one pack! Maths. (You can use more eggs if you want obviously.)
Braiding Sweetgrass
This page of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer which had me crying and feeling very connected on my horrid little Ryanair flight.
t
:
Very beautiful description of something that is very hard to articulate