loving is a lonely job

to live in solitude is to learn how to love oneself and others

Hampi #1, Iwan Baan, 2012

Last week, while walking down a random road in Berlin, I stumbled upon a small shop with walls filled with used books. There, I found a tiny purple-covered book titled Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. As I began reading it, I realised that Rilke’s correspondence with the ‘young poet’ is essentially what anyone who has ever thought of getting a mentor could hope for in that relationship. A lot of guidance, universal truths and some mind-blowing advice on how to live life and love and write (I might have just butchered this book with the simplest line, but trust me, go get it). While reading these letters, it became inevitable to identify with the receiver and let Rilke’s words speak as if he were my mentor, highlighting so many parts of the texts and repeating them like mantras for a life I had only then understood how to live.

The letters talk of solitude and the fundamental role it plays to the poet, often being both a gift and a burden. I believe that was these lectures on solitude that struck me enough to write this piece, which is not about solitude exactly, but about loving oneself. Loneliness plays such a fundamental role when it comes to self-love and self-discovery. It is in those moments when one is alone with only one's thoughts that one can begin to understand their deepest nature. No outside inputs, no distractions, no background music or movie. A mind at its barest status, trying to work out what the meaning of it all might be. There, it is where self-love lies, while waiting at a bus stop, before falling asleep or while staring at a blank page.

‘Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.’

-Rainer Maria Rilke

I have often thrived in solitude more than in other people’s presence. I rarely feel bored in my own company, not because I am a particularly interesting person or have some wonderful insight about the world. I have just learnt how to stay with my thoughts, to dig deeper and to be curious about expanding my knowledge about myself. I could spend days at home alone, barred up with myself only, and no FOMO. Nonetheless, there have been times when sitting alone had become too hard a thing to do even for me, my thoughts suddenly tasted bitter and my reflection became sickening to spot in the mirror. In those moments, there was no love left for me in that locked-up room, so I began looking for it outside. I thought it would lie in others, so I found others. I found others to join, others to spend time with and whose thoughts became mine. Without realising it, I had fully lost myself and my solitude.

This outwardly need to search for company and love, if done wrong, might just turn out to be an escape from our true selves. I needed to love others because I could no longer love myself. I thought that if I could take all my overwhelming disorders and bring them into a relationship we could tackle them together and I would be fixed. But with time I have realised that relationships can only shelter so much from the self, their walls might not crumble at the first rain but sooner or later they will turn mouldy. And I no longer wanted to live surrounded by fungi. I realised that I hadn’t worked on myself enough, I had scraped the surface and then handed the pickaxe to someone else to finish the job for me. I did not actually know me or what I wanted outside of a relationship yet, I had muffled my precarious shape with another’s and could not recognise which were my features in it. So back to solitude, I went.

‘Learning time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves.’

-Rainer Maria Rilke

If loving oneself is learning for a long time to be in solitude, how can one decide when it is time to come out of hibernation to join another? When does someone love oneself enough to be ready to love others? Is it a matter of months, years, or countless therapy sessions or finally achieving the so-wanted career? Is it something you feel in your gut or don’t tell me it is ‘you’ll know when you’ll see it’! There are so many self-help books about learning to love ourselves to then love others healthily, but nobody seems to explain how to determine when the learning is over. People might become fully independent and fulfilled by their persona to the point of not wanting to share any of it with someone else. And how can you blame them?! Imagine working on something for so long, to then hand it over to a stranger with god-knows-what unresolved issues who crumbles it like a piece of paper and throws all your hard work out of the window.

Or are we all working on ourselves just so one day we can finally be in a healthy and fulfilling relationship with others? We are so worried about failing at this one aspect of living that we base most of our existence around it. We so badly want to belong, to feel part of something bigger than our limitate beings, that we constantly hunt, for pain or joy we don’t know, but we will take the gamble just for the relief of dying embraced. But we cannot escape from solitude, because we are alone. And in this solitude, we might as well aim to be the only one who has learnt how to love us.

‘I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.’

-Rainer Maria Rilke