Memory of Loneliness
By Owen Clarke
As I flicked the bike up into fifth and roared into a straightaway, the snow-capped mountains of Parque Nacional Huascarán and the eastern Cordillera Blanca loomed ahead, rimming the two-lane road on all sides. Sheep dotted the hillsides, so far away their fluffy white coats looked like specs of freshly fallen snow. The crumbling stone frames of shepherds’ huts and pasture fences rose from the tall, dry grass.
I was in Peru for a month, traveling alone by motorbike to the Callejon de Conchucos to investigate a copper and zinc open-pit mine for a magazine article.
I would spend the next week utterly immobilized by a vile case of food poisoning, brought on by eating poorly cooked cabro (goat) in a mountain village, but for the time being… I couldn’t have been happier.
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I’m in my mid-20s now, and I feel like I’ve finally made it. I have a full-time career as a writer. I work and live on the road, partaking in a lifestyle that I thought was a pipe dream as a teenager. I’m financially self-sufficient. When I go to bars on the weekend, I can buy friends a round of drinks without checking my bank account and wincing. If I want to buy the DVD box set of all ten seasons of Adventure Time, I can. That’s something my 14-year-old self would rave about.
If I want to live somewhere, go somewhere, do something, buy something, try something… All I have to do is pull the trigger.
No more elderly relatives sardonically asking me how I’m going to make a living with my English degree. No more sweating nervously on the phone as my mom tells me that I should consider going back to school and getting a business degree, feeling like I owe her that much since she and my dad supported me during college and through years of health issues.
Perhaps the most crucial change of all is that the chronic neuromuscular pain and neuropathy that I dealt with for most of my teenage years and early 20s has improved dramatically, allowing me to exercise, climb mountains, ride motorcycles, and participate in all the other physical activities I love, doing away with the insecurity and depression that plagued me both during, and immediately after, my college years.
No more constant doctor appointments, lab work, or restrictive diets. No more debilitating flare-up days after trying to do any physical activity.
I still deal with daily pain, particularly in my hands and feet, and I probably will deal with some form of nerve and muscle pain for the rest of my life, simply because nerve damage is slow to heal, if not permanent, and because I was never given a clear diagnosis. But for the first time in nearly a decade, I feel like a relatively healthy young person. My life is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be.
But despite the pain itself fading into the background, I’ve never escaped the loneliness that came with it.
Years of dealing with constant muscle and nerve pain, resulting from an illness that no doctor has been able to pin down, took their toll. For most of my young adult years, I never felt like anyone else could comprehend or relate to the experience of living in my body, and so I felt alone. I didn’t begrudge them that, no individual can ever completely understand exactly how and why any other individual feels what they feel, but it taught me from a very early age that we are, each of us, an island (Sorry Mr. Donne).
Of course, my parents, friends, girlfriends, all loved and supported me during those years when my chronic pain was difficult to deal with, but regardless of their intentions, they could never truly understand what I was going through. Support and understanding are two different things.
I never felt understood then, and I’ve carried that misunderstanding into now.
We might think we have a great support system, and we very well may, but for all our fumblings with technological advancement, humans have still never been able to put one mind inside another or to truly link two minds together. It’s not blind pessimism to say that no one really understands. They don’t. They can’t. When you feel physical pain, you’re feeling that pain alone. No one else can feel it with you. More importantly, when the light blinks out at the end of the line, no matter how many loving friends and family you have around your deathbed, no one else is stepping across that void with you, holding your hand.
I feel like a normal human being now, and I love my life. But the memory of the loneliness I felt during those years hasn’t left me. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.
For me, loneliness isn’t the same as physically being alone. Ironically enough, it’s usually the opposite, which makes me question my concept of loneliness entirely. The times I feel the least lonely are often when I am physically alone.
The most successful way I’ve found to fight loneliness is by being alone. Perhaps not being alone, necessarily, but leaving alone, going away alone. These experiences, climbing mountains alone, traveling alone, living alone, are what have given worth, meaning, uniqueness, validity, to my existence. They’ve made me feel like I’m coming close to that void that we all cross someday, becoming comfortable with it, basking in the solitude that is its true form.
So, in a lot of ways, I’ve enjoyed the pandemic.
I never related to the people who complained about a decline in their mental health during the isolation that came with it. The pandemic gave me an excuse to be alone, or if not entirely alone, to share my time and space with as few people as possible, and more importantly, the validation that to live a lifestyle like this was the morally correct action, given the circumstances.
My girlfriend and I spent several months in the fall of 2020 living in an isolated house on the Puerto Rican coast, and the winter of 2021 on a 175-acre farm in a remote part of rural Tennessee. Before that, we lived in several tiny towns in New Mexico and Colorado, as I pursued a goal of summiting all 14,000-foot peaks in the latter state by myself. I spent two months in the spring of 2021 in Guatemala and Mexico, traveling alone by motorcycle. I spent October in Peru. Soon I will go to England for a race, then to Spain and Morocco, for a long-distance moto ride alone.
These experiences, ones of solitude, have been the highlights of the last couple of years of my life.
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The first definition I found for loneliness online was “sadness because one has no friends or company.” I don’t feel that in any form. The second definition, ascribed not to a sensation of loneliness, but the characteristic of loneliness, was “the quality of being unfrequented and remote; isolation.” A lonely hilltop. A lonely building. A lonely lake.
This is the definition I identify with. The loneliness of a place.
Loneliness, as I experience it, is directly tied to a feeling of being misunderstood, or not understood at all.
Achieving adulthood, to me, always meant achieving a certain level of stability, not just fiscally, but emotionally. Feelings, or more accurately memories, of loneliness, of emotional isolation, seem to be the only emotions able to rock that stability, and that’s why they bother me so much.
I live a normal existence now, like all my friends. No pain. I’m a physically healthy, financially stable adult. I have nothing to feel isolated or misunderstood about anymore. But that belief, that no one else truly understood what I went through growing up, still makes me feel alone, emotionally, even years later.
I genuinely was happy alone in my high-rise apartment in Lima, alone in the one-room shack beneath the Tajumulco volcano on the Guatemalan-Mexican border, alone in a ruined WWII bunker on the Vrh Bače pass in the Slovenian Alps, alone backpacking through the high San Juans of Colorado.
Going off alone, living alone, traveling alone, it’s a valid suppressant for that memory of loneliness, and that suppressant isn’t a placebo. But it’s not the cure I’ve always searched for, to achieve the emotional stability I want. I realize that now.
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Two weeks later, I was back in Lima, finishing up some work for a week before flying back to Las Vegas, where I was bouncing between motels and a friend’s couch.
The floor-to-ceiling windows in my corner suite on the twentieth floor of the Thunderbird Hotel were stained with a thick coat of smog, accenting the stormy gray skies that hung over Lima. I sat in a thickly-padded leather office chair at the scuffed maple desk, looking out on the streets of the Miraflores district below. Mask-wearing Peruvians scuttled back and forth on the sidewalks, delivery drivers on motorbikes weaving in and out of the swarm of traffic jamming the Avenida José Pardo. Everything and everyone was dirty, tired, and very very grey.
My Spanish was abhorrent, and it felt like ages since I had spoken to anyone in English, even though I’d only been in-country for under a month. I opened a case of Cusqueña beer, readied my chopsticks over a plate of takeout sushi, and turned on an old Bruce Lee movie on my laptop, leaning back in the office chair as the thunderheads massed over the city outside.
You’re living the fucking life, man, one of my clients texted me that evening when I told him what I had planned for my Friday night. On your own. No rules. He was speaking from the perspective of a married father, tied down by a thousand strings, but I agreed with him.
When I spoke of cures earlier, perhaps I was missing the point. Diseases are cured, but what I was feeling was not a disease. What I feel, that memory of loneliness, is merely the raw, uncrafted form of a lesson, one that, through my lifestyle, I’m slowly, steadily learning to shape into a new, stronger layer of emotional stability.
The lesson: Ultimately, we are all alone, and the sooner we come to terms with that, the stronger we become.
I was alone in that high-rise hotel in Peru, but the feeling I felt was the opposite of loneliness. Whatever that means.
Owen Clarke is a freelance writer, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder and editor-in-chief of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
