The Fear of Loneliness
The people who fear loneliness are either hurt themselves or others.
We are all lonely.
The excessive amount of internet consumptions made everyone around us focused on our phone too much instead of a real human interaction. Sometimes we ignore the people around us or stopped a conversation to reply to a messages. We often prioritized the people who is kilometers away from us instead of the people who sits right besides us.
The pandemic makes it worse.
We used to stay home for almost a year, not having any contact with anyone outside our family. We study and work at home. Nobody around us, just screen. As a human who needs a social interaction, looking at screen everyday made us feel more lonely.
It is common for some people to feel lonely since a long time ago before there was an internet and social media. Nevertheless, the feeling of loneliness that people feel today is different from the people back then who lived without social media. There is a feeling of shame included in loneliness for people these days.
Ashamed of not having someone who text us every minute asking how we are doing meanwhile everybody are focused with their phone texting with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Ashamed of not having much pictures posted on social media just like how other people post their everyday life surrounded by their friends. Ashamed of not having hundreds followers, etc etc.
Not many people these days can handle that feeling of loneliness and shame. From what I’ve seen, those people who is not brave enough to be alone are either choose to hurt themselves or hurt others.
I’ve seen people who fears loneliness hurt themselves by staying in a long-term relationship with someone who is not even good for them, or worse who they didn’t have a future with. I knew some women who still choose to stay with their boyfriend who cheated on them a couple of times but they forgive them and then take revenge by cheat on them back. I knew some women who stay with their boyfriend even though their boyfriend didn’t have intention to marry her soon and worse their boyfriend is still open access to other women. There is also women who got treated bad by their boyfriend but still choose to stay because she thinks nobody would love her and the idea of being alone scare her.
And I’ve seen people who fears loneliness choose to hurt others by having a relationship with someone without having good intentions to them — in worse case, they are in a relationship with someone just to have sex. All this type of person do is being in a relationship, break up, get a rebound, break up again, and the cycle repeat. This type of person didn’t see someone as a human being with soul and feelings, this type of person see someone as an object. They use others to fill their void. All because they fear to be alone!
I’ve seen those kind of people around me who hurt themselves or others because they fear loneliness. So I encourage myself to not to be like them, especially a person who use others to fill their void.
Life is already miserable and I don’t want to hurt myself more by staying with someone who didn’t value me. So everytime I fall in love with someone but they didn’t love me as much as I love them, I let them go. Even though it hurts, even though I should cry every night before I go to sleep for two or three months, I let them go. Because what’s the point of forcing someone who didn’t love me to stay?
It is so hard to choose not to fear loneliness and live a lonely life. But after looking at those people around me who fears loneliness and hurt themselves and others, I think that being a loner is the right decision.
Being alone means that I have an opportunity to have so much time by myself so I can learn about myself more. And also not having someone who text me asking how I am doing everyday, eating alone in a restaurant, or go somewhere by myself doesn’t feel scary at all. It feels awkward at first but as times goes by, I am used to it.
As times goes by, living a lonely life is not as scary or as disgraceful as it looked like. Instead of hurting myself or others by staying with someone who didn’t have good and the same intentions as me, I choose to enjoy my own company while also try to find someone who also have good intentions to me.
We are born with talents, everybody has natural ability in them. Some people already recognize their talents, and some haven’t. Discovering our strength and talents is good for career or life path. Imagine how amazing our life can be if we are able to do everything that we enjoy?
If we fear loneliness and choose to stay with the wrong person, we didn’t have time to discover ourselves. If we fear loneliness, we only focused on how to get validations from someone who is not even good for us, or how to make them happy. Or worse focusing on how to take revenge because they have hurt us. The fear of loneliness will caused people to do whatever it is just because they don’t want to be left alone.
So I thought, why should I fear loneliness and hurting myself or others?
Why am I not just try to be at peace with loneliness? There is so many things I can do, places I haven’t visit, good foods I haven’t try to eat. There is so many things about myself, so many potential in myself that I haven’t discover.
