Last week I returned to my apartment, bereft of anyone besides myself. I had spent almost a whole week in his company at both our places after two and a half months of long-distance yearning. The intervening months were defined by a quiet razing of the soul, longing for each other’s presence; emerging from a week immersed in his company it is as though I have just gone deep-sea diving and am now gasping a little in wonderment, still catching my breath.
I suppose this is the hallmark of new love, the sheer giddiness of discovering a kindred soul. If only he was not leaving again! My last decade of dating has been defined by frequent departures and long droughts, a litany of geographically complicated affairs and connections. I should be used to this by now. Yet with him, as never with others before, I feel more acutely the shape of his absence in the spaces he once occupied.
But now that he is away from Tokyo again – such are our work lives – my hours are also imbued with a certain satisfaction at being able to hear my own thoughts again. There, the familiar, celestial pull towards the shores of my own soul. I miss him as much as I missed myself. I am once again by myself, with myself, beholden to no-one but myself. I enjoy my own company though it wasn’t always true most of my life. Solitude keeps me sane; with aspirational nods to Thoreau at Walden, oscillating between aloneness and togetherness is a necessary antidote to the otherwise constant connectivity that modern life demands.
I spend much of my time alone. It is a fact of life for a freelance writer. The act of writing is fundamentally solitary, necessitating being alone with one’s thoughts. Reading, too, gives one a greater capacity for aloneness. But I have rarely felt lonely in this line of work, and almost never when by myself these days.
So in his absence I’ve been thinking about solitude and loneliness. Though they look alike, and are often used interchangeably, they are fraternal twins: one describes a state of affairs; the other represents an emotional response to a set of circumstances. Seated betwixt is the fact of being alone. I suppose when we express our dislike of being alone, we really mean that it makes us lonely; otherwise we would merely be solitary.
This is what I have thought aloud to friends this week: solitude is voluntary, while loneliness is thrust upon you. To deliberately choose your own company above another human being is to actively enjoy being alone. Solitude is isolation undertaken willingly. It implies the existence of a rich inner life, a self that can revel in the joys of tending to one’s own body and soul. It is a (temporary) rejection of all the obligations and inconveniences other people represent.
Loneliness, in contrast, arrives unasked for, like an unwanted tax you cannot evade. It comes at you. It gnaws at you, makes your throat catch, and if you pay attention to your fellow humans, radiates its own aura of desperation. If it could speak it would be a silent, anguished howl. It suggests absence, isolation, unmet expectations, disappointment, lack. More saliently, it is contingent on other people – their presence or absence, what they did or didn’t do.
Dare I say loneliness is other people? I think of someone talking to their friend on the phone the entire time I was around. Or when he made me wait, over and over again. It is the flash of contempt on your friend’s face, their disgust at your sadness: now I feel your pain and I didn’t want to. It is the kiss you don’t mean. It is a door about to close, a final hug before they leave, a half-truth before they ghost you. It is being excluded from their story. It happens when someone stops trying for you, when you stop trying for them. Loneliness stems from who and what you gave up. Loneliness rears its head when you try to escape yourself and fail, over and over again.
Most of us are on intimate terms with loneliness, and have probably had it thrust upon us by people or circumstances beyond our control. There are days when I am beset by it, such as in Kyoto last month, where real-time loneliness collided with the accumulated memories of days and nights spent wrestling with isolation, to the point where I did not know where it all began and ended. But I can live with it. We can live through that. What I fear more than loneliness is the inability to endure its weight.
If there is any panacea I can suggest, however imperfect, it is to face loneliness head on. You can either break under its weight or embrace its contours. Sit with it and listen to its howls and sighs and screams, let it spin through you like a storm. It will not be easily exorcised but there are no shortcuts. As with the rains it will pass, so your only task as a person in this world is to give yourself over to it. I found that this was virtually the only way it became bearable. At some point loneliness stayed long enough, and I let it turn into solitude.
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FLORY'S VENTURES (STUFF I'M UP TO)
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EAT WITH ME Tour season is winding down a little – it has been a breathtakingly full season for me in Tokyo and Kyoto. But extremely fun. I do eating and walking tours in Tokyo, and for at the right times, in Kyoto – so here's where you send your Japan-bound friends. (Or you can forward this newsletter to them.)
JAPAN TRAVEL CONSULTING This is exactly like it sounds. Need to ask me burning questions about interesting places, rail travel, or what to include in your holiday? Ask for me (or one of the other excellent folks) at Japan Travel Consulting.
Save for a torrid piece of autofiction written when I was 17, I cannot recall having committed fiction before. Not even fanfiction. I say “committed” because in my mind it feels like a daring act, and in a way, creating is exactly that. The idea of fiction is liberating for many people but the exact opposite for me. I wonder whether it is fearing that anyone and anything I wish to write about is already running away from me before I even begin committing – yes – them to the page, that they are raring to skip and dash and elude. Is writing an way of pinning them down? Is it trepidation about what I might find if I decide to listen in on the mental chatter? Is it that I have to learn to accept that sooner or later like people, sentences don’t always go where you think or hope they will?
I’m always thinking about those things. And some of those thoughts are mine, but I’m not a very decisive thinker. When I have a thought like that one, I’m not really thinking it’s true for all time, for all people. I’m thinking it might be true for all people. I’m thinking it might be true sometimes, and there might be other truths. I think that indecisiveness is part of why it took me so long, actually, to get writing, because I was quite tentative about what I knew. [...] This is one of the great things about poetry or novels, is that you can hold contradictory things in your mind at the same time and they can both be true and you don’t have to decide between them. – Tessa Hadley
I read Rachel Cusk’s Outlines a few days ago, finished Kudos, and am immersed in Transit at the moment. The people speaking on the pages of her books make various observations and pronouncements, sometimes sardonic and often cynical, but always with a marvelous weight and sense of insight to them. The character speaking right after might disagree with or look askance at what the previous had just said, which on every other page gave me the most electrifying sense of constant mental motion, of having to assess and reassess the truth or not-truth or sort-of-truth of each paragraph. And I keep thinking back to Tessa Hadley’s interview, from which the above quote is excerpted, and how it continues to percolate in my head vis-a-vis writing real things and made-up things and everything in between.
All this reminds me of how deeply impressionable I have always been, how little conviction I have had in my own thoughts or feelings, and how long it took to develop any kind of certainty that I could simply do the things I wanted to do – or at the very least realise there was no-one actively preventing me from doing so. I was the kind of kid who coloured within the boxes and I was always waiting for permission.
It was this lack of conviction which allowed me to trip and stumble into what I thought was a kind of love with someone a few years ago, the kind of affair that is utterly wrong for you but teaches you the kind of lesson you only learn from living through very poor decisions. (At least, this is the only way I seem to understand anything at all.) He tried to solve my problems in the only ways he knew how: logic and rationality and sheer assholery, with little kindness or emotion. Some part of me wished I could be this ruthless and arrogant. It is clear now that I fell for him in part because he was willing to use people and I was not. I craved the decisiveness in him that I lacked. I wanted to be a less blobby version of myself, but it turns out that a lifelong habit of indecision is difficult to break. Or so I tell myself.
I have always been unsure about committing fiction – how on brand! – and whether I could ever draw out from myself a story I had not already experienced or witnessed. Some people say true events are only the version we choose to believe in, every broken bone and missed train and devastating argument a fiction in its own right. Stories have the right to change with us. A narrative is only true for a given point in time or any single version of ourselves. Sometimes I waver when pressed, and ponder acts of mild moral turpitude I think I would never carry out. At times I wonder if I have not been writing fiction all along.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
A Whole Lotta Vipassana (Roden Explorers)
The Perks of Patronage (Nadia Eghbal)
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person (New York Times)
Status as a Service (StaaS) (Eugene Wei)
Leaving on a Jet Plane: On Life in Airports and Coming Home (Catapult)
Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden (Harpers Bazaar)
A FEW THINGS I'VE WRITTEN