Ten Lessons in 2020: Aloneness

Photo: @atostrial

“Loneliness is an invitation from the Divine”

I was recently triggered by an Instagram post by a dear friend who was asking people to share their dating experiences this year. She sent the question out with a photo of her snuggled up closely to her husband with their two beautiful children close by in their paradise house and It stung.

Needless to say, dating in Paris as a 49-year-old American during a pandemic has been non-existent. I had one “date” this year and it was more friendly than romantic.

I’m five months away from ending a whole decade of exploring my aloneness.

At the beginning of this decade my intuitive healer printed the words above on a golden card for me and it became my mantra. Being alone was terrifying for me at the time, and lonely was something I avoided at all cost. I was newly heart-broken and wanting to heal a pattern in my relationships.

I accepted the invitation and intentionally entered into a period of time where I only dated myself. What began as a solid journey inward, became a hiding place that felt safe and easy. I left San Francisco and began to travel the world, teaching myself what my aloneness could feel like if I embraced it fully.

Parts of this aloneness are delicious, liberating, and deeply sacred.

I fell in-love twice during this decade; two quick “stories” as they call them in France with two beautiful French men, and I learned even more about myself and the love that I am capable of.

Feeling ready to love outside of me again, this year has had a different plan.

This year’s aloneness feels different. This aloneness is where you find yourself when the world stops; when the world becomes your 15 square meter apartment in the heart of Paris, and Paris becomes the city that used to be your dream but feels like its dying. It’s poetry really, not the kind I’m used to writing but the kind I’m now living.

l listen carefully to the internal dialogue, all senses on hyper alert. Even a Pollyanna like me is shocked by what I hear some days. And I wonder not how many people are not making it through. I now know exactly where alone and lonely meet; where they are divine and not.

This aloneness is sobering, as are most things that aren’t our choice. But somehow, in all of the slowed-down and deafening silence there is a choice in the accepting, and it is this surrender that has broken me this year. The surrender into another year of saying yes to being alone and trusting that everything is in divine order.

Thank you 2020.