‘Word by Word’ is a column by Garima Behal on learning to ride the highs and lows of everyday life

We’re barely two weeks into 2023, as I write this. In less than 15 days, I’ve managed to read nearly 400 pages of a whodunit, walked about 140,000 steps, wrote and published four 2000-word blogs for the startup I work for, exercised for 30 minutes every single day, and spent a total of 2000 minutes planting make-believe forests in an app that rewards me with an adorable, full-grown virtual tree in exchange of staying off my phone.

I am not productive. I am just terribly lonely. 

And this is how I’ve been coping with being loved when I don’t want to be, being loved without being understood.

I don’t blame the people who love me, not at all. I am grateful that they choose to stick by me when I am engulfed in this cyclic, cyclonic seastorm of loneliness. They wait for me to weather the whiplash till I make it to the shore. 

But I wish they understood that sometimes the only possible cure for being lonely, for my lonely, is to be left the hell alone. 

“I actually think loneliness can be really productive because it’s just pointing you to the moments of being able to access the specificity of you. It’s pointing you to something that is within you that you haven’t quite wrestled with,” writes the poet Fatimah Asghar. 

When my best friend texts me asking if I want to catch up on a call, and I tell him I can’t, this is what I am trying to say. What comes out, instead, is something akin to a careless brushing-off of the man who has spent the last six years of his life being there for me on my cross-continental, self-pitying phone calls, despite his obligations. 

“I just don’t want to talk to anyone right now. My alone is happy and free of problems.” 

I end up telling him people are problematic. I don’t mean him, particularly, but I don’t make an effort to clarify this either. 

I think this is why (and when) focus apps like Forest help. They block me from accessing my WhatsApp texts or punish me with a withered tree if I choose to stop planting and indulge in a chat. My loneliness makes it easier for me to pick tending to the health of virtual woodlands over sustaining that of my very real relationships. 

What can I say? Lonely people make for crappy friends, sometimes. It’s not because we want to be assholes, no. It’s just because we want some room to breathe. A room that’s entirely our own, bathed in the warmth of slow darkness that’s punctuated only by the flickering glow of fairy lights and the soothing strums of lo-fi guitar on Spotify.

A room in which there’s no room for words and sentences because words and sentences are the building blocks of conversation which is the building block of misunderstanding. We are already feeling misunderstood enough to shut everyone out of our messy little worlds, I mean. Why make it worse by talking?

Loneliness finally makes me see what people mean when they say they like to share silence with their loved ones. The fact that I find it hard to talk to the people I love doesn’t mean I love them any less or do not want them around anymore. It just means that for the time being, it’s easier for me to love the bottle-bush tree whose sparsely flowered winter branches wave to me every afternoon on my post-lunch walks, expecting neither company nor conversation, just calm coexistence. 

It’s simpler to fulfill my commitment to pet Bella, my neighbor’s bright-eyed golden retriever, for the five minutes we meet every day. Because she looks at me with those big, dark brown puppy eyes that mirror my own, and she understands how tired, sad, and even guilty my loneliness makes me feel. And she doesn’t judge me or chide me or prod me to do better. She just sits there silently, not needing the crutches of made-up language to make me feel less helpless in my loneliness. 

Psychology harps on about us being ‘social animals.’ I think that’s partly to blame. I need other people, of course. I would even go so far as to say that I need them more than I admit. But that’s not where the story ends. 

The truth is, the world won’t end if I don’t call my best friend back. I won’t become a monster overnight if I put my needs first, even when those closest to me disagree with my methods. I get to be lonely without needing to make apologies for it. Till the time I am ready to embrace the constant mess and the occasional magic that other human beings are, I still get to choose to split parts of my lonely only with Bella, the bottle brush, and maybe the sky-blue sketch pen that color codes ‘lonely’ on my mood tracker.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MyndStories.