Alone

Losses are for real. And a certain quantity of them can’t be made up, compensated, fixed, forgotten, forgiven, and not even substituted. Some things only come once in your life, and once they’re taken away no matter how hard one tries, sooner or later it has to be admitted: you lost something/someone dear. And you even though are can travel back in time to experience what you lost in your imagination, you cannot freeze time there, and you don’t have the power to un-do what has been done. You certainly can go ahead and revive what you lost ten years after, but that brings an awful feeling of retardation and immaturity that makes the whole experience even worse than it would be to just admit the loss.

I don’t think our culture is equipped with what it takes to deal with the feelings that an actual loss generates, and sadly there’s no disguise to the hard pain that an actual loss is. So we just use our best intentions and the sharpest knife culture equips us with: Denial.

When I share the pain of an actual loss with somebody, I am sometimes showered with reparation plans, make-up for the scar tissue and general useless Denial tools; or, more usually, I’m labeled with the victim-complex-that-lives-in-the-past thing. All in all, I’m in actuality unable to share the painful reality that I am living, so I just make the decision to not attempt it again. And another consequence of actual loss arises: loneliness.

When you lose, you’re alone in your loss. That’s how things go, and I don’t think it’s because people don’t want to share the loss, it is just that they can’t. A loss is ultimately an experience of radical inability to commune and communicate, a deprivation that cannot be fulfilled. That’s why to lose is the opposite of to win, and in turn that’s why when you win, you feel in community.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in his essential ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, wrote that we are all alone, and that this loneliness must be loved and trusted, because it teaches us to not demand counsel or rely on understanding. Furthermore, it gives us space to grow.

That way, embracing the loneliness, we are still not able to unwrite what has been written, but we can certainly garner the power to freely write our story from now on. The pain is there, what was lost isn’t; however, you guarantee that the real cause of actual losses—overboard interference in your natural processes—won’t ever again do you harm.

Therefore, just this time, I would like to ask that nobody leaves a comment here in my blog. Just for this entry. All your comments on my other posts are welcome, and have a profoundly positive influence on me, but this time I wish to savour the protective power of my loneliness.

Thanks for understanding.