It is a foggy Halloween morning as I sit here writing this bundled up in several layers to stave off the chill, our macabre holiday decorations-- remnants of a party we threw two nights ago-- surrounding me. This is my favorite holiday for many reasons, not least of which is the opportunity to name and face our fears.
Today I thought I’d write about a particularly ubiquitous fear for people living in a country that is foreign to them, though I believe it also affects every single person on this planet. It’s just more top of mind for expats, immigrants, and those who choose to wander.
Loneliness.
This is a problem people usually only whisper about, as if saying it too loud might summon it like some malevolent demon, or as if admitting to it will make it more real and possibly your own fault. Sometimes, we dress up the concept as though giving it its own costume will make it more palatable. Community, we say instead. The problem with our world today is a lack of community. Community, you see, implies joint responsibility. A single person, two people cannot a community make, and therefore when we say we feel a lack of community, we absolve ourselves of the culpability and shame of our feelings of disconnectedness.
I think the truth is, as ever, somewhere in the grey space between all of these things, a complicated answer born of the mess that is a rapidly changing world, shifting culture, new forms of media and socialization.
But I also think that the truth is quite simple: if we feel lonely, we worry that it is our fault, and that the latter point carries within it the confirmation that we will remain lonely and probably deserve it. And that last bit, the part where we believe we are unworthy, is what often prevents us from doing much about it.
And so we form cliques made up of superficial interests or shared trauma, and we protect entry to them with every fiber of our beings. We project false representations of our lives because we’ve decided that if we don’t deserve to truly feel fulfilled and connected in our own lives, at least we can convince others that we are. We keep ill-advised and unhealthy partners, friends, family around as a kind of devil’s pact against loneliness. We sometimes fail to take risks-- move to a foreign country, take a new job, or a million other things-- as a variant of that bargain.
In the Middle Ages, sometimes individuals would wear a rough and scratchy shirt made of spiky hair as a form of penance underneath their other clothes. The point was not performative, it was a deeply personal form of punishment and atonement. We continue this practice today with loneliness, holding it close to the chest while obscuring it with other superficial issues or outright denial. We might admit to feeling a lack of community, but heaven forbid one admits to the shame of loneliness. And so we suffer in silence.
This is compounded when you have chosen a path in life that strays from the status quo, though it is certainly possible to feel lonely even if we are surrounded by people we’ve known our whole lives. Because if we do take a risk to shake up our lives and it’s hard (and spoiler alert: it is going to be hard), we secretly blame ourselves. This is what leads to a particularly insidious facet of choosing to live in a foreign country: our expectations are high, others assume everything must be amazing, and if it isn’t, well, we chose this. It’s our own fault.
So we often end up imbalanced, either openly and consistently blaming anything but ourselves in a sort of orgy of misery, or stuffing the fears down deep underneath layers of protective false positivity. By the power of Instagram and denial, at least no one will know our shame.
It is easy (and not entirely untrue) for individuals living in a foreign country to blame clashes of culture or time or age for a lack of community and continued loneliness. Yet as with anything important in life, addressing loneliness takes a lot of long, hard work, and it has to start with addressing and mitigating the shame as much as possible. We must believe we are worth knowing and deserve connection. Easier said than done, sometimes.
As I mentioned, two nights ago Adam and I threw a Halloween party in a country that does not celebrate this holiday. Throwing a party only a few months after moving to a place is a particularly sticky brand of anxious: will all of these people, mostly strangers to each other, get along? Or worse-- will anyone even show up?
The truth was that the very person who inspired the party-- a dear Italian woman who had told me that her dream was to celebrate American Halloween-- ended up deciding to take a vacation this week and didn’t even come to the party! Even though I understood this was not personal on an intellectual level, in my mind I couldn’t help but nurture a nasty little voice that kept saying… See? Even the one person who was enthusiastic about this isn’t coming. You live in the sticks outside of the city. No one is going to bother making the trek, and there’s also probably a bus strike anyway. I hope you enjoy sitting at home alone with your husband eating ten kilos of candy surrounded by an utterly absurd amount of creepy skeletons and ghouls in a neighborhood otherwise completely devoid of any Halloween decoration.
Fortunately, I do enjoy this, so it was sort of a win win, but still. The fear persisted and the truth is that in our modern culture, like it or not, people change plans like t-shirts, and several individuals cancelled last minute or didn’t bother cancelling; they just didn’t show. But then several people showed up last minute, or brought friends, and we ended up having an absolute blast.
That wouldn’t have happened, though, if Adam and I hadn’t taken the very real risk that we’d end up simply watching movies that night alone with mountains of snacks, or worse, with only two or three people milling about in a space that was clearly intended to host a large party. If you think I didn’t imagine that potential scenario at 2 am at least once, you’d be mistaken. And I have pretty great self-confidence. My version of this is not that I don’t think I’m worthy, but that well, I like myself, but will anyone else? Will anyone care about the effort we put into hosting this event? After all, other people are one thing we simply cannot control.
It also wouldn’t have happened if other people weren’t willing to take a risk: show up at a party thrown by two people they had probably only met once or twice, and in three cases had never met at all. Three couples I’d met through the magic of the internet took that massive, massive risk to show up at a stranger’s house, not knowing what they’d find, and they did so in costume, per my requirement for the party.
I believe that these individuals were willing to take this risk (and I know that Adam and I were willing to take our own risk) because of the one thing that I have found to be the only possible way to address the epidemic of loneliness: hope.
A hope that we are worthy of love and connection.
A hope that we will find it.
A hope that even if we don’t find it in the first place we look, it might be somewhere else, so we will keep searching.
Creating fulfilling friendships and building community takes a lot of time and effort. It takes navigating stressful public transportation or experiencing crappy bars and bad music or going out in the rain when you have the safety of a comfortable bed and a cat instead. It also takes knowing yourself and your boundaries, and even being willing to say no to unhealthy offers of friendship or community that won’t serve you, even when you are wallowing in your own loneliness and fear.
We cannot control what others do, we cannot force connection, but we can hope, and we can choose to act upon this hope.
As I sit writing this, I look up at our dead baby garland made up of cheap dolls we found at the market and spray painted white before stringing them up across the length of our terrace. It slowly drips icy rain droplets and looks, well, completely out of place despite the pumpkins underneath it.
In the light of day, Halloween decorations can seem silly, almost foolish. As do most of our fears, I think. In the light of day, we squash our loneliness down deep with endless scrolling, clicking, liking, and posting. Or we constantly berate ourselves that we should be grateful for what we do have, even if we know that it’s not enough.
And that is why I appreciate Halloween. It is a blatant reminder that even though we can deny or ignore our deepest fears in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, they still exist. Even if we hate and resent them, they are there-- but it also reminds us that our fears are feelings worthy of attention and work. The seasonal cycle of birth, death, and renewal continues on, and there is always the opportunity to face our fears and try again.
Because the reward for addressing our fears is great, and possibly the only way to achieve what I believe we are all trying to find: self-acceptance and peace.
And that is what I wish for you all on this day: hope and the courage to act on it.
Happy Halloween!
Hey everyone!
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x ash
A few snaps from the party if you’re curious…