When your girlfriend leaves you for someone else, and your friends turn their backs on you, you learn a lot.
After seven years of living together, my girlfriend broke up with me via phone call.
The last time I saw her was in a photo on Facebook giving a snog to a redhead dressed in a traditional kilt in a nightclub in Edinburgh, 1700 miles from our home.
I was 33 years old, and that same year, I also lost 99.9% of my childhood friends.
I ended up living in a rented apartment, lying on the floor of an interior room, praying to God that my body and soul would stop hurting.
After a long time, I overcame that painful loneliness- or maybe I made friends with her, I don’t know.
What I do know and will never forget are these three cold, hard lessons that loneliness taught me.
1. You don’t miss others
When you are alone and excluded, you realize that you don’t miss the people; you miss the person you were with that people.
That third brain constantly forms when you interact with one or more people.
As my mother says, “When the children get older and leave home, you miss them, but most of all, you miss the attentive, helpful, loving mother you were to your children before they grew up and stopped needing you.”
I missed the person I was with my girlfriend. I missed the person I was with my lifelong friends. I missed my youth. And it hurt me to see how that person I once was died.
Because I could not be that person without my girlfriend, I couldn’t be that person without my friends. I couldn’t be myself any longer.
It would be my turn to grow up and become someone different. And that was what hurt me. One version of me was dying so that another could be reborn like a phoenix.
Lesson: when you become someone different (and better), you stop missing those who left because you don’t want to go back to being who you were around them. But before all that, your past self has to die, and that hurts; it hurts a lot.
2. Pain is what transforms you
Since I was alone and had no one to share my sorrows with, I started writing letters to myself. I would then read the letters out loud.
I discovered that writing is like mining. Miners dig through rocks to find precious metals, and writers search inside themselves to rescue pieces of their souls.
And that’s what I was trying to do when I wrote: rescue every piece I had broken myself into.
Once, I went out to get drunk, and I ended up drinking with a well-known Spanish poet. After telling him about my miseries and reading him one of those letters I carried in my pocket, he said to me something I never forgot,
“The writer’s life is like that of worms: it doesn’t matter how unpleasant it is, but the silk it produces. That’s why there are so many cursed writers with infamous lives whose works lasted through time. So boy stop whining, and turn all your miseries into art. The world needs poetry.
To write is to give, to give to others the juice of a ripe fruit called life. Something that at first was a small bud, then a flower and finally an orange that was harvested and squeezed until the pulp was exhausted. To write is to liquefy the entrails and serve them in a glass with a straw and two sachets of sugar to subtract acidity and bitterness from the juice.
To read is to drink the juice. Who drinks? The reader. Why does he/she drink? To feed on the words that another soul in a different time and place poured on a paper that today serves as a glass.”
Lesson: The best thing you can do with all your loneliness and despair is transform it into something beautiful and valuable: into art. In doing so, your wounds will heal faster.
3. You are looking for companionship when you play the victim
We all have an enemy inside who trades minutes of pleasure for lives full of misery. It’s an unfair deal. But that makes us accept it, that it’s unjust, and that others see it.
We self-destruct to get attention, to cry out for help, for someone to take pity on us and notice us (I did it because I secretly wanted my ex to find out from a mutual friend and return to me).
That’s why I kept lamenting.
Indifference is an unbearable punishment for the ego. The ego prefers being a victim to being a hero because the hero’s life is lonely, but the victim’s life aspires to have the compassion of others, of those who have left.
The problem is that everyone gets sick of pitying you and having you tell them your shit over and over again. Because in the end, they realize that you are using them, and you are instrumentalizing your interactions with them, you objectify them; you turn them into attention dispensers with whom you drug yourself to feed your victimhood.
And those who left are not mourning you; they are celebrating their lives away from you.
My ex was living the excitement of a new romance; how could she be crying for me?
Still, my ego thought that if she felt sorry for me, maybe a miracle would happen, and she would stop having fun with the redhead and come home with me and our epileptic little dog.
But no. She didn’t care, the dog, me… nothing.
Even though I didn’t see it then, her not returning to me was the best thing to happen because a person who leaves your life without looking back and doesn’t care what happens to you is a wrong person to come back with.
Lesson: Sooner or later, you must be your hero.
A virtual hug
AG
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