Loneliness and Freedom

‘freedom’: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action

As I’ve explored the concept of loneliness, I have discovered loneliness is the same thing as a lot of other things. As Pema Chodron says, it’s the same as contentment. CS Lewis shared that with true consciousness comes our greatest sense of loneliness. And Carl Jung says, “It is…only in a state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures”. We are actually healed by our experience of aloneness.

Loneliness, then, is a multi-sided dice. And for me, loneliness means the same thing as freedom. I’ve thought a lot about freedom in this quest to untether myself. I suppose we are all intrinsically “free” – we have free will, we are technically free to choose our paths, we can take care of ourselves in the hardest of situations. Most of all, we have the power of resilience. But we also have SO MANY perceived shackles. We live our lives with an underlying sense that we are tied to rules and obligations, we are “stuck”, we are imprisoned by our environment and our lack of opportunities. To gain freedom would require a significant and dramatic breaking away that would disrupt everything we know and all the structures we have built.

But let’s think about this. If you were literally locked away, being “free” would mean waiting out your sentence or breaking out of jail. Either one would come at a painful cost. For those of us that are metaphorically imprisoned, we have the same choice. We can wait it out, which essentially means that we continue to live with the shackles willingly, or we can break free. Again, both choices come at a painful cost. To break free from our perceived shackles, we must first experience a driving force that inspires our desire for independence. Not all of us will experience this driving force. But if you do, and you decide to do something about it, then you must break (rip, tear, pull, split) free.

The tearing of oneself away from what we have known as our identity and our life structure leaves an open wound where that connection used to exist. Attachment means “the physical connection by which one thing is attached to another”. So, it makes sense that breaking an attachment will hurt. And when it comes to human relationships, there usually isn’t just one party involved. So, you have to accept that it hurts for both sides of the attachment. If it’s something like a job, or a philosophical belief, or a religious practice, the tearing apart can have other implications on family bonds, a personal sense of identity, or our underlying self-worth. Breaking free literally hurts. And it exposes us to significant vulnerability. And it requires a concentrated effort on healing.

So freedom requires healing and a whole lot of love. It’s not until we are free that we can truly begin to heal because the act of becoming free exposes the wounds. And it’s easy to go back to the chains that we are so accustomed to. It’s really hard to learn to live untethered. We don’t trust ourselves to operate independently, we are overwhelmed by the weight of our own loneliness. If you are seeking freedom, you have to know that you are also seeking a long journey of self-discovery, grief, bliss, anxiety, true contentment – all mixed into a big soup that becomes your only meal day in and day out.

Loneliness is hard because you have to really sit with your own self and understand that we are all ultimately alone. Freedom is hard because it forces a breaking away that exposes our hurts and our sensitivities and our biggest fears.

But you flip the dice one more time and you see the eye chart clearly! Loneliness is freedom. Freedom means that I’m living without the made-up rules that have been applied to me for my whole life that I thought were unbreakable. I am a woman in the world, wearing pants, making my way on my own terms, deciding where I want to go and how long I stay there, choosing who I spend my time with, staying up late to watch silly tv because I can, deciding last-minute to drive four hours away to watch a waterfall, designing my own spiritual practice that works for me, parenting my children in a way that fits with my own values, managing my finances in a way that makes sense to me and my goals, putting the toilet paper on the right way or upside down because I really don’t care, encouraging my kids to live this life to the forking fullest because it’s our chance to be the most amazing version of ourselves that we can achieve even if that means we spend every day sitting next to a lake watching the fish jump and eating Cheetos because we like how they turn our fingers orange.

That’s all. Loneliness is freedom and I choose the pain of freedom.