This morning was one of those mornings that I was woken up by loneliness, i.e. the feeling of loneliness was so intense and unbearable once my sleep was light that I had to get up, despite the lingering tiredness, to get out of my head, out of my heart, and into my body, to move, to act, to do something to keep the pain and almost anxiety at bay.
The loneliness of this summer exacerbated by the lack of exercise and travel due to my injuries is taking a toll on me.
Or maybe this specific difficulty today is the effect of the book “Under the whispering door” by TJ Klune. After blazing through most of the book, reading 50-60 pages per evening before bedtime this past week, now that I’ve gotten to the last 60 pages when reality hits, where “the end” is really near and incumbent, I cannot read more than a few pages at a time and even those are hardly bearable for me. The last few days before the ultimate separation of two people whose souls met, who love each other deeply but cannot be together, are probably still too much for me to read. They still remind me too closely of the two huge losses I endured last summer.
And being so lonely here, now, makes it even harder.
I do believe that this summer I have found, or rediscovered, and mastered some deep tools of self-regulation and capacity to just be with myself even without intense exercise or travel. Having been forced into loneliness and forced to inaction by external factors this summer, I think I have been able to cope with it and handle things much better that I thought I could. In that sense it’s been a growth spurt or a rediscovery of inner resources similar to the worst times of the pandemic in 2020-2021. It’s good to see I have these resources within me, this capacity. But it hurts nonetheless.
It’s terribly painful and lonely.
Sometimes the solitude is good. But overall this loneliness is really hard on me.
The Little Prince and the Fox 