Red Room Where the Writers Are

This is both an excellent and a miserable time to be alone.  Excellent because there is no need to censor opinions or be politically correct.  Miserable because in times as frightening as these, it is all that much harder to be happy without someone to lean on and have lean on you. It’s hard to be single in your late twenties.  I imagine it gets harder still as more and more of your friend begin to pair off.

There are two cults in this country, perhaps in the world.  The attached and the alone.  Both sides have their cheerleaders and vocal proponents just as they both have those that long for the other.  I find myself torn between the two ideologies.

Freedom is what I am afforded now.  The freedom to write every night as long and as late as I wish.  The freedom to do what I want, eat where I want and fantasize as much as I want.  Yet that freedom is always tempered by loneliness.  The bonds of relationships go deeper than the sometimes beautiful solace of being alone.  For every triumph achieved through solo endeavor is inevitably cheapened by the inability to share it.

I have been on both sides of this battle.  Feeling stifled, as if your creativity is muzzled by the constant presence of another can be frustrating and infuriating.  The constant need to remember two lives as opposed to one, the compromise and sacrifices to one’s happiness that must be made in deference to the “relationship.”  These things are both hard to swallow and easy to embrace.  This is because we do not remember the sad parts of our mundane histories and so we repeat the same mistakes while pledging to remember them.

I am of the mind that it is better to pair off.  I say this with full knowledge of the loneliness and depression that currently have me biased yet free to create. It is my inconsequential reality that has me convinced.  While I toil away writing things that no one may ever read I am forced to think back. Forced to remember a time when I could come home from work to a warm smile and loving eyes that supported my efforts, no matter how curtailed they may have made them.

We are social creatures and we mate for life.  This is in our biology, irregardless of the pop psychology that exists to make men and women feel guilt-free for cheating on their spouses.  Perhaps we lack the freedom being alone can bring but at what cost?  The cost of our hearts?  And isn’t that truly the battle we all want to win?