Unlovable or undiscovered?
The loneliness of a Boomer
I am reading a book by lay Zen teacher Susan Moon called “This is Getting Old” which helps me accept that my medical fragility is real. Ms. Moon writes early in the book about her experiences with retinal detachment in her 60s. It makes me glad I don’t have vision problems. I can see. I can hear.
She writes very honestly in the book about loneliness in one’s sixties. I have written affirmatively about not being lonely at this age, but recent events have revealed to me that it wasn’t an absence of loneliness. I was in denial.
There’s a shame in being an old lonely guy like there’s a shame in being an old guy with poor balance. They both suggest a lack of proper life maintenance, poor planning, and a basic failure to prepare for things one knew was coming.
I was just targeted online because of my loneliness. As I review my actions and decisions in that situation I am stunned by how willing I was to suspend disbelief and confuse manipulation with love. It was as if I wanted a Snickers bar so badly that I become willing to pick up what I knew was a discarded Snickers wrapper off the ground, dive my nose into it’s fragrance, and convince myself that I had found a Snickers bar at long last.
That’s really Jones-ing for a Snickers. This is how badly I want someone to love.
I do have a lot of love in my life. I have good friends. I have people who invite me into their large, multi-generational families. I have friends who will buy cross-country airline tickets because they want to hang out with me. I have open invitations to guest rooms in more than a half-dozen US states, and in three other countries.
I don’t have someone who invites me to love them. This is what I was hiding from myself. I can’t un-see what I’ve just seen. Now that I have seen it, I understand why I’ve hidden this with sophisticated denial. It hurts.
I have two voices in my head. One says “you are loveable, you’d make a great boyfriend.” The other says “No one is ever going to want you.” I hear them both, but the hopeful voice never gets affirmation from my life’s events. The latter voice just notched another win. It’s streak is unbroken; it’s message undefeated.
My Zen study teaches me to face life’s difficulties squarely. One should peer into the pain because the relief also has to be there. Shame gets in my way. I turn from facing this directly. I obscure, distort, and mislead myself. I know that “you are unlovable” isn’t true. I wish I felt it in my old bones. I don’t.
One of the gifts of being older is that you’ve been through a lot. I look back and notice, with some satisfaction, that things, good or bad, have never worked out the way I thought they would. The most wonderful events of my life have arrived as surprises. I didn’t see my train wrecks coming either, but not everything that has surprised me about life has been a train wreck.
Because I also see that, the fact that I don’t see my way out of this loneliness is something I can work with. I don’t know if I can fix this or if I will see myself through it. I can sit with this not-knowing-ness. My particular lineage of Zen is particularly focused on sitting with not-knowing.
I hope this helps someone not feel as lonely.
You’re right, Susan Moon. This is getting old.