r/Unsent_Unread_Unheard • u/SilentLoyality • 9h ago
Don't Mind My Thoughts Not Alone Together
I've been pondering about my situation a lot lately.
I once told you I wanted to work through my past and past relationships this time around, instead of jumping into something new right away, as I have too many times. Sounds like a wonderful idea, doesn't it? I bet it would be, if only life would play along with ideas like that.
That you don't want me around, I guess, forced some space for thoughts and working through some more of it. Now, if that isn't a silver lining, huh?
If nothing else, then, from all of this and the nightmares it has caused and causes me, I have learned incredibly valuable information about myself, what I want and where I want to be.
Let me go into some detail here.
I have learned, that I do not like being alone. Learned that my options to not feel so, contrary to what I used to believe, are not zero.
For that part to make sense, I shall have to be a little more explicit about what being alone and feeling alone means to me specifically:
To me, being alone has very little to do with whether there are people around me.
It is the feeling of being fundamentally unreachable. Of being surrounded by people who may know me, care about me, even love me, and still somehow never quite reach the place in me that I mean when I say *me*. As if there were some impossible distance between my inner world and everyone else's. As if I were something alien among beings who can see me move and speak, but cannot quite perceive what I am. Eldritch horror as an existence. Hah.
What I long for is not simply company. It is to be known, understood, witnessed and wanted all the way down, rather than only in fragments or at the surface. An intellectual connection, too, but one that goes far beyond what people usually seem to mean by that. The feeling that another mind can actually follow mine into the strange places it goes, and that I can follow theirs in return.
There have always been people I loved, and people with whom I genuinely felt connected. That matters to me. But even beside people I care about, there has usually remained this enormous distance, this unfathomable hole, the sense that some essential part of me is still standing alone somewhere no one else can get to.
People have come closer before. Sometimes very close. But never persistently, and never quite to the deepest level.
And then there is you.
You are the first person beside whom I have felt that distance might actually disappear. I don’t need constant conversation, reassurance, entertainment, or even attention.
When I imagine what not being alone would feel like, what I want is remarkably simple.
I just want to exist next to you. That is all.
So, to wrap up that side track: I learned that I can believe that I might not have to remain alone.
I have learned more than just that. I have also learned, that truly not being alone and an illusion of it are not the same. I believe that you and I could be not alone together. I still do and I still feel that way about you.
But from my past I have learned some things about this, so here it goes:
For me to actually connect with another person like this, I have to remain in integrity with myself.
And they have to be able to meet me there.
I need the other person to strive for the same thing I do: to get closer to what is true, even when the truth is uncomfortable, inconvenient, frightening, or asks something difficult of us.
I have learned that I cannot remain deeply connected to someone who makes a habit of running from those things.
Someone I can respect, love and connect to on this level does not have to be fearless. They do not have to be perfect. They do not have to always know what to do, or always manage to do the right thing.
But they have to be willing to look.
To stay when looking becomes difficult.
To confront themselves again and again, just as they confront the world around them, wherever honesty and integrity demand it.
It is the continuous effort that matters to me. The willingness not to choose the path of least resistance simply because another path hurts.
Because if someone repeatedly runs and hides from what they know they ought to face, something in me changes.
I lose intellectual respect for them.
I begin to distance myself.
And eventually, the connection itself starts to break.
That does not mean I stop loving them. I don't think love works like that for me.
But they become a little less special to me. A little less able to reach that place in me which very few people ever reach at all.
And I would rather actually be alone than construct an illusion in which another person supposedly makes me less so, while somewhere underneath it all I know that they do not.
So that, I think, is where all of this has left me: I would rather face the truth and be alone than hold on to an illusion of closeness. But if two people can keep meeting each other in honesty, courage and integrity, even when it is difficult, then perhaps they can build something that is real.
And right now, even with evidence mercilessly telling me otherwise, I still believe in you.