You can find yourself alone throughout your life, at different times and different places. To be alone often implies that you could’ve been with someone, or that you’re separated from someone or something. Over time this can lead to crippling and debilitating loneliness. It doesn’t have to happen while you’re alone.

I often find myself alone while I’m with other people. It’s as if the room goes silent and I recognize that while everyone there has a purpose, a connection to the others, I’m on the outside looking in. But I’m sat right there next to you all.

This is a feeling of being like oil in water. Together but separate. Great heat and friction can blend us for a time, but when it becomes stagnant we’re once again two different forms of liquid, unable to form a union, unable to get together.

And the worst part is that I always have to take on the qualities of water in order to fit in. In the process of doing so almost everything about me is fake, is lesser than I truly am. And at the end of the night I’m left with the realization that no one actually know me.

I don’t suffer from crippling loneliness, but a feeling of wanting to be known. Not famous, not heard of, not even infamous. Just known. To have someone know who I am, and appreciate the sides of me rarely seen, those that rarely surface.

I don’t care about being alone. That’s been my modus operandi for so many years, for decades of my life. Crippling loneliness never comes from the realization that I’m alone, but that no one knows who I am, and that I truly have no one. And you can’t talk to anyone about this.

“Put yourself out there” or “do something you like and the right people will follow” or the ever unhelpful “you’ll find your people”. It’s not enough. It ignores the core of the issue. It’s a simplification, as if the cure for loneliness is other people. Or the way to mend my split inner sense of self is the introduction of enough random people to eventually yank together enough loose pieces to make a coherent whole, to find that missing puzzle piece.

It’s not possible. I’ve been through all of that before and it never leads to anything but a complete and utter diminishing of everything that I am in favor of everything that everyone else is. Any relationship is a series of give and take, and of course it is. That’s not really the problem. The issue is that while you’re paying for gas, I’m driving the car.

As we go along the value of my car diminishes, while the value of your money remains the same. My mileage is used up, while you can exchange your money for other services. I feel like I’m a single use item, discarded at the completion of our task.

I’m valued whenever I have something to offer, made to feel like a soul mate or the long lost best friend. The second I’m used up I’m tossed aside, in favor of other people. People with a nicer car or more available destinations.

I’ve tried many different approaches. I’ve even shelved my entire self, put on a fake mask of something, but it just isn’t enough. Most people aren’t really equipped to deal with someone like myself, they prefer shallow interactions because they have so many interactions a day. I don’t blame other people for my own issues. I understand it. If you have 10 people constantly interacting with you of course you’ll be smeared out unable to engage fully with every single one. But I need depth, ride or die, a bonding friendship.

And then the inevitable separation happens. My oil sinks to the bottom because I’ve lifted your water to the top. But I’m not given a hand to equalize our position, instead I’m left at the bottom while the rays of the sun takes you to bigger and better places.

While my words and actions are able to lift you to dizzying heights, I never really get any affirmations in return. I never know where I am in the grand scale of everything. And in the end I realize I’m like a book taught to a tired classroom of high school students – barely understood, rarely remembered, and left derelict to a forgotten memory. A tip of your tongue moment.

All I want to be is known. To be appreciated, to be recognized, to have someone see the value in who I truly am. At this point I’ve given up this falsehood of an idea. Not fully, my optimistic side would never let me, but I recognize the folly in believing.