alone, together.

Implicit in this project is the confidence that what humans think and feel matters. That a story told can have resonance for another and that there is worth and value in shared communication. Ed and I have created a simple structure for a project that will be completed by the generous participation of those who are willing to lend their voices. It will be this collection of anonymous identities that will colour in the lines we have drawn up. Loneliness is a complicated and subjective experience. Each individual we have interviewed has described a distinct experience of what they perceive as loneliness.  One interviewee explained:

I just feel a lack of interest in general, even within myself, for the world around me, perhaps a lack of colour. Loneliness isn’t a strong feeling; it’s more like an absence of feeling…a surrender to a daily routine, a surrender to things that need to be done – a certain blandness- a state in which it’s very easy to function, it’s very easy to go about your routine, and people who are forced for one reason or another into a fairly restricted compass of social movement and communication are really quite capable of doing that for a long time, but then experiencing things with other people becomes a luxury, an oddity, an exceptional, heightened state of being.

Then in this publication my father expresses the converse.

I have felt lonely more times when people are around then when I have been on my own...Many times I can be with a group of people whose outlook on life, aspirations, beliefs, are so different from what I experience as reality that I just do not feel any connection with them.

For me it has a different significance, I would say that it has an almost constant presence. It being a persistent and unwieldy thing- not linked to cause or effect. That stems mainly from me not feeling connected to something in myself, as though I am not really present, there is an unreality to what surrounds me, a feeling that nothing matters.  These sensations, of course, travel in waves and there have been times in the company of my brothers perhaps, or a lover who I can talk to for hours, that some precarious and precious connection has been established with the world. Or perhaps, when I find a great book (one that has somehow articulated all my half gestated thoughts) that I feel very wonderfully and secretly connected to the thoughts of others..

Amongst other things I can feel ashamed at not enjoying life (like it can feel that others do) and losing the desire to connect, losing desire at all, and in this state of mind, it feels that wanting and needing are privileges people don't realise they have.

Feelings such as these can create self-fulfilling loops of negativity in ones life, because the shame that can accompany loneliness further isolates the individual, as sociologist Brene Brown explains, many people hide their vulnerability as they secretly feel that:

There is something about me that if other people see it, I won’t be worthy of connection.[2]

Alone, Together. In Conversation and Thought privileges these strange and awkward feelings, but it by no means is exclusively a study of melancholy and despair. The term loneliness implies a lack, but its cousin ‘solitude’, carries with it a sense of serenity that one can feel when apart from the pressures of interaction and our participants have the opportunity to express a wide variance of feeling. We hope also that reading or hearing something intimate and true from another person can bring comfort and the soothing balm of a shared struggle with experience.

There is, of course the risk that our project will be accused of being dangerously sentimental, by indulging the emotional preoccupations and navel gazing of our community. There is something significantly different however, in the culmination of many voices as opposed to the dictatorship of the ‘Artists’ voice, which can so often be heard holding forth on the state of their emotional well-being (hear I count myself complicit). By collecting the inner monologues of many we are provided with a constantly moving set of thoughts, ideas and images, with one individual canceling out the supremacy of another opinion with their own and so forth. The potential for a broad range of response and expression is what makes this project compelling. I imagine that the final tabulation of our interviews will display an interesting set of likenesses and differences, as we witness how others thoughts both intersect and diverge from our own.

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In response to our final question What is the one question you would most like to ask others? We have had two different responses that I think display this potential for diversity quite sweetly. One interviewee wanted to know:

Whether others feel as though there is a true, undeniable sense of sadness deep inside, that they feel, maybe not all the time, but it is there and that they might live and be happy and have fun, but there is some…. I feel as though there is just so much pain that people feel and I can’t understand how people can’t feel sad, because to me anyway, despite all the good things, there is just so much to feel sad about, even without living in poverty, despite how lucky and privileged I am, I feel so much sadness deep down and so I guess sometimes I wonder whether everyone has that or we all kind of pretend we don’t or decide not to address or live by that feeling because it’s too hard to and you just won’t be able to get a job or get out of bed or be productive or try to make the sad, bad things go away if you hold onto the sadness every single moment of the day. That’s something that lingers around and I wonder whether everyone has it deep down or even would admit that they have it even if I asked….

Whilst another’s response spoke to a similar sentiment, but came from a very different angle, wanting to know,

How do you pursue joy? Is it something that you value or is it something that you think is incidental? Is it integral, or is it happenstance? Do you think you are entitled to it? Is it a priority, or is it a coincidence?

This publication compiles writing ‘around’ the topics we will be addressing with our 8 questions. Many of them are creative responses that respond indirectly to what we are asking. The writers describe connection vs. disconnection, and how one might experience an internal emotional world. In speaking of connection we must think also of the person in relation to their environment (other people and things and the space in which they move).

We are grateful for all the people who have participated so far and to those that may in the future, for their gracious ramblings. The structure of these conversation means that often the interviewee must discover their answers as they speak them through. I think that not everyone knew what they thought until they spoke it– finding points and then diverging and then returning again. The audio responses to these questions will not be rehearsed and slick, there will be full of sprawling articulation. This is fine, we’re not hoping for perfection, only for sincerity.

-Alanna Lorenzon