An Encounter with Loneliness

I threw up my life on Sunday. Provoked by an overconsumption of vodka tonics on Saturday night, my body decided nothing was staying in. Shivering, I made a bed of bath mats on the bathroom floor, surrounded myself with towels, and lay next to my new friend: the toilet bowl. And there it went, in approximately 12 minute intervals: all the poison my digestive system protectively rejected.

As I lay there, in a sort of delusional state, weak and disgusted with myself, I felt not only the painful pangs of "I hate you right now" from my stomach, but also a feeling I'd not seen so close to the surface in a long time: I felt incredibly lonely. As though with every purge I also lost my knowledge of nurturing and belonging, I seemed to grow increasingly emptier. There's nothing inside me, was the recurring thought. I suddenly had an urge for evidence of every lesson I'd ever learned that had made me capable of providing myself with love and care. I wanted to know that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" existed inside me, as a tangible idea that I had proved throughout my life. I wanted to know that rejection, pain, abandonment, and loss had created muscles in my body and provided me with resources that I could rely on for survival.

What I felt instead was a hollowness, an endless void. There was no physical evidence of the things I had overcome and the lessons I had learned. Any acquired strength or courage had left no imprint. The depths of my stomach had been evacuated, and with it went all my adult-like knowledge that everything would be okay.

I didn't have much time to dwell on this, as I eventually fell into a deep sleep, and by the time I woke up, I was the same as I had always been, except my stomach was flatter and my complexion paler. I felt weak, yes, but my body knew how to go through the motions of taking care of myself. I could get up, shower, change, eat something bland, drink water, and lie back down again. I could tell myself, everything is going to be okay.

But I can not shake that for those couple of hours, exhausted of my defenses, I felt an emptiness so deep it paralyzed me. My knowledge of the world, of myself, and of my life, had somehow abandoned me. The inner mother, the adult-within-the-child, the wiser voice; they were all gone. I was alone.

Was it real, I wonder? Was that loneliness the essence of humanity, and all the rest is just a sham to help us survive? Or do we really have souls, a higher Self, a sense of belonging to a bigger picture?

At the end of the day, are we just alone, or is there really something at our core that never leaves us?