What is the emotion you are most familiar with? The one that has been your traveling companion since almost before you can remember. Perhaps the one that you’ve spent your life trying to avoid.

Mine is loneliness. Hands down. No question.

Wikipedia defines it as “an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation”. How fun does that sound?

However.

Loneliness has helped me become who I am today. She has served as a wise and kind mentor, helping me learn early on to cultivate a friendship with myself. To feel comfortable in my own company. To this day, time alone is a balm, which means I am never without a friend.

She led me to books from my earliest years, introducing me to the multitude of friends that are found in those pages. My favorite Christmas present was, and is, a new book. Books offer their friendship without hesitation. Pick me up. Read me. I’m always here for you.

My love of reading led me to a love of writing. Words on the page are my way of finding meaning in lived experience. Mine. Yours. Ours. Words on the page connect writer to reader and back again, creating friendships with people we may never meet, but come to know intimately.

Writing led me to speaking. Who knew a shy, introverted, sometimes-lonely girl would love standing on a stage, but she does. Speaking is simply a way to embody the words on the page and bring them to life in the presence of others.

I’ve always been one to forge fewer but deeper friendships. While I still wonder if it might have been better to cultivate more, I wouldn’t trade the depth and connection of those on my friend dance card for one with more names on it.

In conversation with my wise spiritual director, Dane, I was reminded again that the gift of loneliness is intimacy. It invites us to forge deeper connections. With ourselves, others, and the natural world. Often when we’re lonely, we aren’t longing for other people as much as we are for our true self. The one we were created to be, and sometimes leave behind, in an attempt to please others. Loneliness isn’t due to a lack of friends, but a lack of connection to oneself.

Loneliness is an invitation to come back home to myself. And you are always welcome to join me there.