You’re a Loner If They Need You, If They Don’t You’re Just Alone (A Treatise on Loneliness)

 

            As a child, I never had a problem being alone.  In fact, I sought out alone time.  I loved people, but years before I knew what the word ‘introvert” meant, I knew I was an introvert.  I enjoyed being with my friends, and I had many of them, and I enjoyed being with my family in my house that was always somehow both boisterous and peaceful.  But I also enjoyed going out to the yard to play solo baseball, concocting fantastic scripts where I was the star second-baseman of my team, The Mississippi Pac-men (because I had a baseball jersey with an M on it and also a Pac-man shirt).  In the winter, it was football; I’d don my too-small Bears uniform and move through a season wholly independent of what was actually happening in the NFL.  And all year round, I’d play basketball at the hoop on Roosevelt Place, winning games with last second shots and helping my imaginary three-on-three team to the state championship, which we won every year.

            (This is probably where my life as a writer started.)

            As I grew up, this dichotomy (which I never felt was a dichotomy) continued.  I didn’t have a ton of friends in middle or high school, but the ones I had were nerdy and great, and I always, always had weekend plans.  I was also close with my family and cousins and hung out with them, too.  But I still loved stealing away for a long solo bike ride or finding an empty hoop, where I would shoot baskets for hours.

            In short, my life felt balanced.  I could have fun with friends and alone.  I never had to be alone, so when I was, it was usually divine.

            Then I graduated high school and my core friend group split.  My childhood best friend moved away to college and another friend vanished into a relationship.  These were the people I spent most of my time with, so my life changed pretty instantly. My first year of college was done at home (Purdue Calumet, now Northwest), however, and though my friend group had diminished, I still had plenty of friends around, and family. 

Sophomore year, I moved down to Purdue University in West Lafayette.  One of my dearest high school friends and I were to be roommates, and I had a couple other high school friends down there as well.  I was looking forward to the experience.  And it started off well.

But then, something changed.  My roommate, I soon found out, planned to go home every weekend, as did another friend who lived there.  Two others I knew were huge partiers, and I had little in common with them.  My best friend, though only a couple hours away, immersed himself completely in fraternity life and all but vanished for much of the year.  I had met a few people in my forestry classes, but we hadn’t yet become friends

And, for the first time in my life, I found myself alone without choosing to be.  For the first time in my life, aloneness felt not divine but troubling, sometimes even stifling.

Initially, I endeavored to make the most of it.  But soon, weekends began to feel alien and strange, and I had to force myself out of my dorm room, force myself to venture forth and meet the world.

One Saturday in the fall, I drove about an hour away to Shades State Park and had a decent enough time hiking by myself.  On the way home, I decided to stop at the Denny’s in Lafayette.

It was Saturday night, and it was packed, and I immediately felt wildly uncomfortable…a feeling which crescendoed when I was seated at a table in the middle of the dining room, ringed by people having dinner.  I was the only solo diner in the place.

And in that moment, I felt such deep shame, such deep humiliation, I could scarcely even eat.  I felt like a spectacle.  I felt close to panic.  I felt like everyone else in the world had friends, and I had no one…and, worse, that everyone knew it, and was either judging me or pitying me.  Was there something wrong with me that had taken until age 19 to manifest?  That night, I slunk back to my empty room like a refugee.

I began to dread weekends (at least the ones when I didn’t go home). During the week, it felt safe, okay, to be out and about, to eat alone, to read or study alone.  But weekends were different.  On weekends, I felt the world, in its entirety, would go off and leave me, and that no one even entertained a thought of me.  (This was not true, and sounds melodramatic, but it sure felt this way.)

My roommate flunked out that semester.  Ironically, he never left our dorm room during the week, and I often resented him being there, but really missed him when he was gone.  I was briefly paired with a dude who I had nothing in common with, but he had a friend on another floor and transferred to live with him.  (Though struggling with loneliness, I was glad for this.  In my room, I was alone, not lonely, and it felt like a refuge.)

That semester progressed and, with the thawing of the seasons, I began to slowly emerge.  Though I still spent most weekends alone, I was learning to come to grips with it and even enjoy it somewhat, though I still avoided public places on Friday and Saturday nights.  And I began to make friends, from work and classes.  I still didn’t know how to hang out (I didn’t drink and I thought that was all anyone did - it was certainly all my best friend did when I went to visit him at his fraternity) but I would usually see a familiar face in the dining hall or student commons, and say hello, and have someone to eat or hang with.

The Spring after my Sophomore year ended, I went north for a five-week Forestry Practicum in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There I made many friends, some of whom are still with me.  I began to feel like the world had opened up and let me back in.

And later that summer, back home, I met a girl and fell in love for the first time.  I felt like I had arrived, like my lonely days were behind me.

Wrong.  I was in that relationship for about a year and a half, and though there were some beautiful moments, I had ignored myriad red flags to reach those beautiful moments.  That relationship imploded, in a way that was so over-the-top painful, it became humorous in retrospect.

By this point, I had a ton of friends, and all of them (and my family) rallied around me, and my last six months at Purdue were fine.  I drew on my earlier experiences of involuntary loneliness, and the strength of character I had gained therefrom, and sort of made it my image.  I was now Daniel, the Hippy Cowboy Loner, with long hair and a fucking horrible beard.  It became my aesthetic, even though I wasn’t alone.

And then – again - I was.  I graduated and took a trip to Saskatchewan (alone) and then moved back home, sans job or money.  I had a few friends around, but most of the closest ones were still at Purdue.  My best friend moved to Arizona.  Again, weekends became daunting.  I was also single and felt at the time that I needed a relationship to validate my existence (or something like that) and felt a bit directionless (alas, no forestry jobs were looming.)

I took a job as a substitute teacher, and discovered I was good at dealing with students (at least high school students), and decided to go back to school (Purdue Northwest nee Calumet again) to get an English Education degree.

Another change.  I fit in well immediately.  I became a writer, and hung out with writer/ literary friends, and got my life’s first great haircut, and was even considered (gasp!) cool for the first time.  I fell in love with a writerly girl and, after numerous stops and starts, became officially unsingle.  My friends and I formed a writing group, and weekend plans became implied (often with many people involved).  I still cultivated the loner identity, but it began to feel more like fan fiction.  I graduated and took a job teaching English at my alma mater, Calumet High School.

After three years (more stops and starts), the writerly girl and I split up.  And for the first time in my life, I could not stomach being alone for even a night (maybe because I had felt very alone through much of our time together).  I had a big, supportive friend network now (high school, forestry, writing group, teachers I worked with.)  And I made plans to hang out with someone every night, and that comradeship saw me through the worst of my sadness.  I was, in essence, a loner who couldn’t stand to be alone.

As that winter waned and spring came, however, I finally came to the realization (or, more accurately, accepted it) that I could not heal like that.

Thus, I set off on Spring Break, to Louisiana, intent on finding truest solitude and making it mine.  I ended up loving it.  I even went backpacking alone, something that had theretofore terrified me.  I wanted to get right to the heart of seclusion, to see who I was when there were no other voices competing with my still, small, inner one.

I was also working on a long story, my magnum opus, set in San Francisco, a place I had never been, and wanted to finish it.  I did.  It is called “A Slow Gin Fizz” and it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written.

As summer break approached, I, single, fairly flush (or at least above water) financially, and aching with wanderlust, was contemplating where to go, when a voice spoke up from somewhere deep inside.  “Go to San Francisco,” it said.

Perfect.  I would road trip out west to California, a place I had not been in 15 years, see the sights, and compare what I had imagined of the City by the Bay with immutable reality.

To make a long story very short (as I have already written nearly 50,000 words about it) my waitress at the restaurant where I set my story is now my wife (Patricia Brugioni nee Ornett). 

(I had gotten to a quiet, alone place where I could hear my voice again, and it had led me in a fantastic new direction.  Yay for lonesomeness!)

Our first year together was done in a long-distance format; my extensive training in immersive loneliness came in really handy, and even the three and four week stretches between seeing each other were bearable.

We decided to move together to Chicago (Hyde Park) and signed our lease in June of 2006.  Again, I thought my lonely days were over.  After all, I had a new girl and a great new place in a great new neighborhood.  My friends, seeing how awesome it was, would surely leave the nothingscape of Northwest Indiana for a true bohemian experience, right?

Wrong again.  I soon realized the party was not going to follow me up.  Concurrently, Patricia took a job nursing in Naperville that often called her away from home for days at a time, weekends being no exception.  I was again faced with the prospect of venturing out alone, this time in a huge, indifferent city.  On weekends, this was doubly hard.  I just felt like a loser.  (Boo to lonesomeness!)

Thankfully, two experiences in Chicago changed my perspective, I think forever:

1.      One Saturday evening, I was to meet Patricia downtown, and, from there, we planned to head to the northside to visit a coffee shop we’d heard good things about.  Well, I don’t remember the circumstances, but she was unable to join me, and I, trying to remain undaunted, decided to walk the couple of miles to the place.  When I was out walking, I usually felt whole and vibrant and unaffected and unselfconscious, no matter what day of the week it was.  And as I walked that night, I felt exactly that. Nearing the coffee shop, I suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, just decided to keep that same energy and enjoy myself, no matter what.  If I looked like a lonely loser, what of it?  And I arrived, and ordered, and sat down, and looked around, still feeling fine.  And what to my wondering eyes should appear? Everyone in the place (there were about twenty, most of them my age, both men and women) was sitting alone, reading or writing, listening to music – and not one of them looked uncomfortable or ashamed or even lonely.  This affected me profoundly.  I realized then that it was okay to be alone in public, that no one was judging me or pitying me – or even noticing me.  In Chicago, it was okay to go solo, no matter what day it was.  No worries, mate.

2.     That Christmas Eve, Patricia had to work overnight.  I was sad that I would have to spend Christmas Eve alone.  To that point in my life, such a thing was unfathomable.  But…I spent the evening wrapping presents and listening to music and watching strange indie movies and…I enjoyed the hell out of myself.  I knew, full well, that Patricia loved me and was with me.  And I was able to enjoy being alone on Christmas Eve night, even if I didn’t choose to be.

*

So, what is the point of all of this?  I think I just wanted to say to people who are struggling with loneliness (as I did and sometimes still do) that there is nothing wrong with being alone, whether you are doing so intentionally or not.  That you are never really alone.  That you are loved and connected, always.  That you are an integral part of our huge team, even if you don’t see it now.  It took me a long time to realize this, but the signs, if you are open, are there.

I think, often, about a night on the aforementioned Louisiana trip.  It was a rainy Thursday night in March, and I was camping at a mostly empty campground.  As a campfire was out of the question, I decided to head over to the laundry room and do a load of clothes.  As I waited, I read Beautiful Losers, the second novel from Canadian poet and singer/ songwriter Leonard Cohen.  The plot is loose (he’s called it “more of a sunstroke than a book”) but could be summed up as: hell is a small, dirty apartment in Montreal, during an endless blizzard, wherein a protagonist, in love with a long-dead Indian princess and reliving conversations with his wife (who was dead) and his best friend (who may never have existed) is slowly killing himself.  Uplifting, right? And hardly the preferred choice for a warm, rainy Spring night.  But it hit me then (and very strongly) that Leonard Cohen, ladies’ man extraordinaire, beloved guru with millions of fans, understood loneliness thoroughly.  This was not fiction mongering.  This was someone who got it, man, to the depths of his soul, and in that lonely moment, I got it too.  All of us are alone, and that’s okay.  Because all of us are connected.

As I said, I still struggle with loneliness.  But just as often, I revel in it.  I love having my wife at home, love the thrill of lazy weekends (and not so lazy ones) together.  I love hanging out with friends, too (at least occasionally). But when Patricia works out of town, as she often does, and when I don’t have plans with anyone, I still look forward to weekends, immensely.  I’ll go backpacking alone when it’s nice, order Mexican food and watch ghost movies when it is not.  And I’ll venture forth, impervious and undeterred, into the city whenever I feel like it. 

Because I want to and because I can.

And there is no shame, no humiliation.  There is only love.

October 25, 2025

London, Ontario