ꦍOnce upon a time, there lived two little girls. The younger one had a bright, happy disposition with a very temperamental nature. Her emotions were always on a roller coaster and she felt her joys and sorrows with equal intensity. The older one was quieter, and more withdrawn, and she often sat still for many hours in one place. People kept their distance from her; the rumour was that she brought bad luck. The younger little girl was a delight to behold; she roamed the world with great enthusiasm, at all odd hours, like the queen that she imagined herself to be. Boisterous and charming, she gathered company wherever she went—she chatted, she sang, she danced on the roads. Never once did she ask her elder sister to join her in her adventures. However, the dutiful elder sister followed her wherever she went, like a shadow. But she kept her distance because she knew the younger one did not enjoy her presence at all. She trailed along because she feared her little sister’s naive trust in strangers. She worried something ominous was always waiting around the corner. She also knew that when things went badly and the little one tripped and fell over the betrayal of her faith in someone, a whole nightmare began to unravel with her violent expressions of grief and heart-wrenching outbursts. That’s when the elder sister swooped in with her arms open like wings, embraced her, and protected her from further damage. Slowly, as the little one recovered and went back to her glory in the sun, the elder sister returned to the shadows. And like that, the two little sisters lived, with each other, without each other.
🎶This story came to me on a difficult afternoon. I was dousing the embers of a recent romantic catastrophe with copious amounts of gin and tonic and it dawned on me that the younger sister was love, and the older one loneliness. No matter how little love thinks about loneliness or pays heed to her omnipresence when life is a full-blown adventure, loneliness is always there, secretly accompanying love in all its journeys across the wild and boundless terrains of the heart. But we are accustomed to thinking of loneliness as a disconcerting feeling, something to be afraid of and run from because it brings pain. As if a stalker, waiting. To me, however, these are misunderstandings about loneliness, an erroneous judgement formed when we are agonising over the loss. I have often experienced loneliness rendering deep wisdom that if engaged with could become ways in which to navigate the tempestuous seasons of the heart, and sometimes an antidote to the spiralling tornado the loss of love throws us into.
﷽In times such as those when love has left me, dried up, or died and I have felt myself slowly tipping over the edges of the abyss, loneliness has enveloped me in what has seemed like a security blanket. This saved me from further suffering, depths I would not have been able to crawl out of; ruins I would not survive. The experience of loneliness can act like a shield between us and the random, meaningless void that is life when the love in us is too heartbroken to breathe. It keeps us busy, occupied with ‘feeling lonely’, pitying ourselves thoroughly, and blaming everyone else, but it keeps us active, keeps us alive. It offers a gentle soft landing, rather than the brutal crash into emptiness. Some of these encounters are moments of a kind of self-preserving self-love that is needed to wade through the swamp of loss and not completely destroy ourselves. Many of these acts of ‘feeling lonely’ help us to hold space for grief or abandonment with dignity, mourn it, and then ease into living again hoping to slowly heal. Loneliness can be an act of refuge.
There are many ways in which loneliness is also an experience of bravery. It is evidence that we are fragile, vulnerable. Yet we love.
🌼Experiences of loneliness where one has just oneself for company can give both time and space for a deeper meditation on the self and its awareness. In the way we live today, the mind is always crowded with what I will call details of ‘the lives of others’. The constant bombardment of this information does two things—the first is that it fills us with an obsession with material and emotional gaps and absences in what we receive from the world, and the second is that it slowly and steadily erases our ability to reflect on and critique our own selves. Many times loneliness can be both a prompt and the zone for us to relook at ourselves and the relationship we have built with it. Like a fever can often be a symptom of a deeper malaise that is residing in the body, the experience of loneliness can also be a sign that it is time—time to explore the damage we have endured with gentleness, soothe the wounds of our histories, and extend care to our inner insecurities, infirmities. These ruminations help us understand that the incompleteness we often feel on our own without adequate connections and partnerships of love is not an aberration. It is not a deficiency or inadequacy that needs to be rectified, but an inevitable human condition. Engaging with loneliness allows us the contemplation that lightens the weight of this inevitability. It sparks a reimagination of how we can live with it. And then the reaching out to others, the connections and relationships of love that we seek to build, are no longer a desperate chase for a lifeboat to save the self from the fear of loneliness. They become adventures of curiosity and discovery of their own. For me, extreme experiences of loneliness have persuaded me to look within, no matter how uncomfortable I have been with what I witnessed, and ultimately receive myself—warts and all—with kindness. Loneliness is an act of this reflection.
🐈There are many ways in which loneliness is also an experience of bravery. It is evidence that we are fragile, and vulnerable. Yet we love. To love is often to give the power to someone else to be able to hurt us, break us. Knowing there are no insurances against the wounds that may be and often are inflicted, to love is also to understand that we might be witness to our own cracking. And the broken are the brave because they embody proof of encounter with something larger, stronger, and more powerful than themselves. They bear evidence of having lived through that and survived. Loneliness is a reminder of this ability we have. There is also another way in which loneliness is proof of our fearlessness. When we love something very much and are passionate about it—be it a goal or a cause—we don’t care how many people walk with us towards it. As Rabindranath Tagore put it ‘ekla chalo’ or ‘walk alone’ if no one responds to our calls, knowing we will be embracing a kind of loneliness that is hard to get rid of later. As the terrain gets rougher, the journeys get lonelier still. I feel if you meet a lonely person—you should know that you are in the presence of great fearlessness. Loneliness is an act of courage.
𓂃In a world that is rapidly categorising every feeling we have, every emotion we express, and every aspect of the lives of our hearts into neat piles of the positive and negative, the process of pathologising our experiences comes at the cost of failing to deepen our understanding of their ambiguous messiness. Love and loneliness are sisters who lead complex, chaotic, entangled lives. Our own lives may be richer acknowledging both their presence in all their disheveled idiosyncrasies with welcoming grace.
(Views expressed are personal)
Arundhati Ghosh is an independent cultural practitioner and writer living in Bangalore
(This article appeared in Outlook’s Valentine’s Day 2025 special issue on love and loneliness in the era of technology. It appeared in print as 'Brave Lonely World.')
