Homesick for somewhere that doesn’t exist
What I learned about loneliness by allowing myself to cry.
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Last week was hard. But I learned a ton about myself, my relationship, and the nature of loneliness.
My partner hit what I like to call “The Wall.” She’d just traveled for two weeks, hanging out day after day with friends and colleagues. She seemed at a distance. A little less talkative and relational. A little less excited about the things we usually get excited about, like playing tennis or finding new dinner recipes. A little more preoccupied with work and her phone.
The Wall typically lasts a day or two. But this time it stretched into three, then four days. A voice in my head screamed: Where the f*ck are you? I want my partner back! Another voice worried: Does she even like me anymore? Maybe I’m not interesting enough. Yet another was like: Maybe if I clean the dishes every night or surprise her with a getaway trip to a cute, romantic town in the mountains, she’ll like me again.
I call that last one “Nice Guy.” He shows up in my thoughts whenever I’m feeling disconnected from her. He gets really panicky when the disconnection lasts for days. He comes up with all kinds of elaborate plans to make her feel better.
Nice Guy was getting louder in my head. The angry voice kept flaring up. The self-doubt kept telling me I was too boring. I’ve learned that the best thing to do in these moments is to check in with my partner (or whoever I’m feeling “off” with).
I told her I felt distance between us. I asked her what was going on. I admitted I was worried about what she thought of me. To my surprise, she said it had nothing to do with me. She said she felt normal, other than wanting some quiet time after traveling.
That calmed me down a little, hearing that she wasn’t secretly planning to leave me. Yet I still felt off. She was heading to spend the weekend in Philadelphia with friends. I was heading back to my hometown to visit my parents. I love my parents, but it didn’t make me feel any less boring to be spending a weekend on a rural Maryland farm with retirees, while she’d be living it up in the city.
As I drove down Interstate 95 past Washington, D.C., I checked in with myself. I turned off the podcast I was listening to and took a few deep breaths. Nice Guy was still in my head, chattering away. So was the anger and self-doubt.
But there was also something else. Something underneath all of those thoughts. Something in the depths of my chest. A hollow emptiness. There was also a lump in my throat. And pressure behind my eyes, like I wanted to cry.
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There’s a Spotify playlist I created years ago while on a solo road trip.
I was driving some rental car across some southwestern U.S. state (probably New Mexico, because I love it). I was headed to some Airbnb in some town to eat at some restaurant and hike up some mountain. Lucinda Williams’s “Ventura” came on and that same lump-in-my-throat hollowness welled up inside of me.
Put on my coat
Go out into the street
Get a lump in my throat
And look down at my feet
Take the long way home
So I can ride around
Put Neil Young on
And turn up the sound
I named the playlist “American loneliness.” I haven’t been to many other countries. But I’ve driven for days across American deserts and jagged mountains. I’ve seen the earth bend across Kansas cornfields. I’ve visited family tucked away deep in West Virginia hollers. I’ve driven through a billion suburbs filled with fast food and strip malls. I’ve walked city streets surrounded by people in their own worlds.
There’s something about loneliness in this country that both attracts and terrifies me. I want the big wide-open spaces, the emptiness, the so-called “freedom.” But I also want more closeness. More connection. More intimacy. More community. So much more sometimes that it makes me want to cry.
I don’t actually cry, because I’m a man. Turns out most of the songs on the playlist are by male artists: Bob Dylan’s “You’re a Big Girl Now,” Neil Young’s “On the Beach,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Straight Time.” Most of them radiate a tortured independence. That yearning for space and closeness at the same time.
As I wrote recently, there’s something about having grown up and been socialized as a man that feels like being a magnet repelling other humans. As
put it: “It can be so hard to reach out and connect to others when patriarchal norms get in the way.”Men have been taught to not value close connections other than our romantic partner. We’ve been taught to look down on caring for others and nurturing friendships. Americans of all genders are suffering through a loneliness epidemic. But men have suffered the steepest decline in friendships over the last few decades.
The other thing about the artists on the list is most of them are white.
Whiteness is a false sense of belonging. The idea of a “white” race was invented only a few hundred years ago. It was created not to unite but to divide working-class European immigrants in the American colonies from enslaved Africans and Indigenous people. The rich and powerful wanted those immigrants to feel superior, even if they too were struggling in capitalist society. They all but forced them to give up their cultural traditions of communal living and assimilate into capitalist individualism.
Those immigrants were my ancestors. As
writes in , they were “stripped of their rich ethnic identities and given a false racial identity that would turn many against their allies of color and increase their compliance with the corporate exploitation of workers and the planet.”Yet there’s nothing special about white male loneliness. There are plenty women on my playlist: Williams, Patty Griffin, Stevie Nicks. And artists of color: Nina Simone, Gil Scott-Heron, R.L. Burnside.
What ties all of these artists together is being American. Everyone here has been pulled from our roots by a hyper-individualized version of capitalism. Those of us who are white. Black folks. Indigenous people. Everyone. We’ve been forced to replace our ancestral ways of living with a culture of overwork, over-consumption, and isolation.
Americans work more than we ever have—and more than workers in other industrialized countries. We spend less time with friends and family, and we don’t volunteer as much as people decades ago. The U.S. is the only developed country without guaranteed paid family leave or vacation leave.
nails what many of us experience when we’re forced to make work our priority:“Ambition requires you to have unhealthy priorities. I have seen it again and again. In myself and others. Ambition requires you to sacrifice the things that matter most in life—people, love, peace—to achieve something that matters in the eyes of capitalism, so that at the very end of that achievement you can circle back to: people, love and peace. Exhausted and burned out.”
Though, there is one song on the list by a non-American. In “Homesickness, Pt. 1,” Emahoy Tsegue Mariam Guebrou wanders as if she’s searching for something she knows she’ll never find. Which makes sense. Guebrou was an Ethiopian piano prodigy whose music wasn’t appreciated in early 20th century Ethiopia. She ended up in an orthodox convent in Israel, where she died last March.
I finally cried when I got to my parents’ house, in my sister’s old bedroom, which they’ve turned into a guestroom.
I was in an online therapist training, surrounded (virtually, at least) by other therapists. My parents were downstairs, doing what they do, working on chores with MSNBC on in the background.
One of the therapists encouraged me to take a few deep breaths and put my attention on the hollow emptiness. She asked me what I saw inside. Myself at four years old playing in my neighbor’s yard. She asked me how I felt toward that four-year-old. Boom! The tears came. I felt so bad for him, all alone outside while my dad worked on the house and my mom cared for my younger sister. He had to spend a lot of time alone back then. He had to grow up so fast.
I didn’t cry as much as I needed to. There’s was that being a man thing. But I learned that loneliness—the black hole—is actually a little kid inside of me. It’s not something to be afraid of. I can handle it. I also know it’s something I’m going to have to handle, living in this lonely, backwards, overworked country.
Now, a question for the comments below: How often do you feel lonely? What do you do in those moments?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll get my weekly Friday Q&A posts about improving your relationship and friendships, plus the warm feeling of supporting my writing.)
Well said! In addition to the relentless pressure of late-stage capitalism, American men are socially conditioned to avoid emotional vulnerability. They don’t form intimate emotional relationships with other men out of fear of being labeled “gay”. They don’t form intimate emotional connections with platonic women friends due to pervasive accusations of emotional infidelity by romantic partners. Which leaves straight women in the position of being the only emotional support for their straight male partners. A role that many straight women are becoming more vocal about resenting.
This was so lovely Jeremy, thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Speaking of connections, I recently came across Nadia Meli's beautiful writing; I find it delightful when writers I follow reference each other. You know you've found serendipitous souls.