Can you believe it’s been a full year since I moved to Thailand?
In that time, I’ve been navigating the shifting terrain of a new life—balancing spiritual practice, creativity, friendship, and solitude. A second ten-day silent meditation retreat, batches of soap made by hand, some meaningful connections, and many long video calls back to ‘Merikkkah have shaped this year. Daily walks and bike rides, cooking with ingredients from the open-air markets—all of it has become part of a larger rhythm of self-care.
But in the quiet of this new life, three words keep surfacing like mantras: aloneness, loneliness, and solitude. They’ve become more than feelings. They’re questions. Invitations. Echoes of a deeper inquiry into what it means to belong—not to others, but to myself.
Aloneness: The Belonging to Self
The fear of aloneness isn’t about being physically alone. It’s waking up in a room by myself and meeting the version of me that no longer hides behind the masks I once wore. The government job. The family scapegoat. The person quietly believing they didn’t belong
Now, there’s no audience. No applause. Just me asking—sometimes gently, sometimes sharply—Do I belong to myself?
This stage of life has asked for a new kind of presence. Not to prove anything, but to simply be with who I am now.
In the words of John O’Donohue:
“You are most deeply yourself in the space where no one is watching.”
That space is where my writing lives—not as performance, but as reflection. Aloneness isn’t emptiness. It’s a place where my own voice can rise, and where belonging begins not with others, but within.
Loneliness: Aching for Connection and Home
Loneliness is different. It’s the ache for connection—for someone to look me in the eyes and say, “You are seen. You are not too much.” It’s not just the absence of people. It’s being in a room full of others and still feeling invisible.
This kind of loneliness holds grief—not just for company, but for places, roles, or versions of myself that I no longer inhabit.
And yet, inside that ache, something else stirs: movement. A strange dance of tension and possibility. As much as I want to retreat from it, I try to stay. To let it stretch me. To believe it might be preparing me for a new way of being.
Morrie Schwartz once said: “The pain of loneliness is real. Don’t deny it. Feel it, then use it to reach out.”
His words remind me to not harden around the ache, but to stay open. To recognize that loneliness, too, is a bridge—to others, to my inner life, to what still matters.
Even in loneliness, a whisper persists: You still belong—right here, right now.
Solitude: The Deepening of Belonging
Solitude isn’t about isolation. It’s about integration. It’s the spaciousness that allows me to remember I was never separate to begin with—only distracted, disoriented, or trying too hard.
This is the hardest lesson for me. That belonging doesn’t require performance. That I don’t need to earn a seat at the table. In solitude, I start to hear the difference between noise and truth. Between ego and essence.
This writing is part of that process. Not to create something “useful,” but to reunite the fragments of myself. To name what’s hard and still choose presence. To become someone who can return to others—not from need, but from wholeness.
Solitude becomes a kind of sanctuary. A warm shelter, as John O’Donohue might say, from the wild weather of the world.
Belonging: Beneath It All
Belonging isn’t always something I find in others. Sometimes, it shows up quietly, beneath the louder gremlins of self-doubt, rejection, and abandonment. It’s the voice that says: Even here, even now, I am worthy of love.
It’s the act of reclaiming myself—without waiting for permission. Of recognizing that even in the darkest moments, something in me endures: dignity, resilience, and self-respect.
But I also know the shadow of belonging. The sting of being cast out or overlooked. The deep ache of being told—explicitly or silently—that there is no place for someone like me.
Still, even in the midst of all this transition, the ember doesn’t go out. It flickers when I choose to stay with myself through heartbreak. When I return, again and again, to my own center and remember: No amount of rejection can undo my fundamental worth.
I’ve learned that belonging lives in the place where:
• Aloneness becomes presence,
• Loneliness becomes a quiet hope,
• And solitude becomes a homecoming.
Belonging isn’t about being accepted everywhere. It’s about being able to move through the world without shrinking, hiding, or abandoning yourself.
It’s the inner reminder that rises like a whisper:
You were never lost. Only searching.
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May I find, in aloneness, a sense of home. In loneliness, a prayer. In solitude, a return to the fullness of who I am. |
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