Someone Like Me: Finding Solace in Solitude

So it’s about time that I write something about being lonely.  I will warn you now that this is quite the scatterbrained piece, so bear with my madness.  Anyway, I know you’ve all heard before: being lonely is different from being alone.  I can assure you now that I do not feel alone.  Even if I did feel that way, I’d have the amazing song “Not Alone” by Darren Criss from “A Very Potter Musical” that would immediately take me out of my funk.  This is my point precisely: we have strong emotional relationships with music.

I can go on for days about emotion and music and the powers of music therapy.  I even took a class called “Music and the Mind” which I’d be able to tell you more about if I actually paid attention in it.  Nonetheless, I know we’ve all had our days where we just wanted to listen to music, shut off the world, and create our own alternative reality.  I know that I have an extremely strong kinesthetic reaction to music, so dance has become an additional way for me to release pent up feelings.  Altogether, we translate emotional ideas into sensory and tangible elements, and the product of this process is what we like to call art.  I can also go on about how this has all shaped my major, what my goals are in life, and all that jazz, but this is not about my educational pursuits or my dream career.  It’s about loneliness.

So we all have strong relationships to music, which is what I just attempted to establish.  I know, for example, that I have been enamored with the entire Adele album “21” for the past year (note item number 5 on the Post-Thanksgiving Post from a few weeks ago).  Jay Brannan, Duffy, and even (embarrassingly enough) Taylor Swift are some others, amongst many, with whom I have also grown a strong emotional tie because of their music.  Many of their songs, and others regarding loneliness, lost love, heartache, sadness, what-have-you, appear on my sarcastically, but aptly, named iTunes playlist “The Worst Playlist Ever” which I put on when I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps.  

One of the songs on the playlist, Adele’s “Someone Like You,” has been blasting in my ears for the past year, and even if you hated the song, you were bombarded with it everywhere you went.  It played on every radio station, there were remixes of it that blared when you went out at night, and I even just heard a Dominican lady with a thick accent singing along to it in a store in my neighborhood.  I gained a strong affinity toward the song because it explained exactly how I felt in a much better way than I could ever express it, but I can understand how it can concurrently be excruciating for somebody else.  Regardless of your feelings about the song, I can assume that you’ve probably felt that way before.

Now this whole time, I was feeling bad for myself and getting sad and nostalgic when I heard the song.  I felt just like Adele.  I always thought, “Y’know what?  I WILL find someone like you.  Or someone better.  I will persevere and get past this bullshit.”  But then I thought of it in another way.  What if I were on the other end of these lyrics?  What if the person she was singing about were me as opposed to be being the singer?  Was I the one that got away (shameless plug of Katy Perry’s “The One that Got Away,” another song on the playlist)?  I sat here thinking this whole time about how depressed I was and feeling sorry for myself, but what if these roles were reversed?  How about if I were the mythical “you” that was being pining for?  How does this change the meaning of this song and the feelings that I associated with it?

With that in mind, somebody out there may actually be singing about me.  Or wishing for “someone like me,” but I don’t even know it.  We’re all so busy crying about “you” and finding the new “you” that we don’t realize that we are someone else’s “you.”  We are “you.”  

Now that’s confusing, but what I’m trying to say here is that we are as much the victim as we are the perpetrator.  Yes, we’ve all had our hearts broken, but I think we fail to remember that we’ve been heartbreakers ourselves.  Even without knowing it, we could be breaking someone’s heart.  Tell me the last time you’ve hopelessly been in love with someone, but they didn’t even know how you felt in the slightest?  You’d probably say approximately five minutes ago.  It’s embarrassing to think that I had to watch the terrible gay movie “Eating Out 3” on Netflix at 2AM last night to realize this.  However, “Eating Out 3” had a point if you took out the grotesque jokes, numerous gay culture references, and the gratuitous sex scenes.  We are all so self-conscious that we are not good enough that we create lies to cover ourselves up even when unnecessary.  We try so hard to be that "someone like you," even though we may already be just that.

We have enormous self pity, and we sit here feeling bad for ourselves thinking about how much happier the person must be who has caused us this pain.  However, that person is just as sad as we are, probably not at the moment, but has, at one point, been right in our place.  In that sense, we are not alone, we are just human, and all humans have these universal feelings with different ways of expressing it.

So as I think of why I’m sitting by myself in Starbucks sipping on my grande hazelnut iced coffee deciding where I want to third-wheel on New Year’s Eve (cause it always seems like everyone else is dating someone except for you), I think, I’m a great fucking third wheel.  Yeah, I don’t have someone else next to be balancing it all out, but I’m still keeping this tricycle upright on my own.

Everyone is too busy searching for that “someone like you,” that they don’t realize that this person is already within themselves.  You  must start thinking that this “someone like you” is actually someone like yourself.  So as much as I’d appreciate someone to snuggle with at night or someone I know I’ll be giving a New Year’s kiss to once the ball drops in a few days, I guess I’m fine with not having that.  I know that I’m incredibly stubborn, so when people say the generic crap like, “You have to love yourself in order to love someone else,” or some variation thereof, I don’t believe them because I’m fucking sad, and I just really want a boyfriend to come to my rescue and hold me until I shut the fuck up.  But we have to realize that we already have that capability within us to heal ourselves.  It’s an awkward notion to think that the best way to ameliorate our loneliness is to stay lonely, but it is within that solace in our solitude that we come to terms with the fact that we are not actually as alone as we may think.

So go on finding that someone like you.  That person’s actually much closer than you think.