Filling those empty moments.

True Friends

“Friendship needs no words—it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.” Dag Hammarskjold

“At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.” Brendan Francis

I had dinner with some friends of mine on Tuesday night. We went to the Bright Star in Bessemer, AL, a landmark establishment continuously operating since 1907. It was a gathering to celebrate one friend’s sixty-fifth birthday and we had a wonderful time laughing and gabbing. The four of us are women who live alone; all busy, active, involved folks, but at one point the conversation turned to the subject of loneliness. We talked about the various times of day or night that lonesomeness is likely to strike and what we do to combat the feeling. We agreed that it comes with the territory of growing older, losing loved ones and living alone.

Loneliness also comes from having few people with whom we can be entirely ourselves. Many of us have loads of relationships, some long term and on-going, but we know to guard our words or risk expulsion. Being true to one’s self, when that self is out of step with the crowd is a prescription for rejection and we know it. Sometimes even within our most intimate relationships, we know there are certain topics that cannot be broached without raising acrimony, and so we stuff those thoughts and feelings. Every time we bite our tongues so as not to show our true colors, we lose a little bit of ourselves. It is all those lost parts that create in us the sense of aloneness, the sense of not being truly known and accepted by people we care about.

This is where true friends come in. So many of our relationships are superficial by necessity; we should not bare our souls or ‘spill our guts’ to most of the people we know. Emotional boundaries are the hallmark of healthy people. But somewhere in our lives, we deeply need people with whom we can be real, warts and all. With whom we can be playful, and crude, and stupid and ugly and know that they love us in all our guises. Cultivating a ‘circle of reality’ goes a long way toward giving us a sense of belonging; a sense that we can let down the veils and simply be ourselves in safety. One true friend is worth a million acquaintances.

Thank God for friends,
Jane