A Cure for Loneliness

One of my all-time favorite songs is "All by Myself" by Eric Carmen. The melody is based on Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 (in C Minor Opus 18 II Adagio Sostenuto). It a beautifully melancholic piece that exudes all sorts of sad emotions. It is easy to see why Carmen loved it so and put words to it. One part in particular always touched me:

Living alone, I think of all the friends I've known,
But when I dial the telephone, nobody's home.
Hard to be sure, sometimes I feel so insecure,
And love so distant and obscure, remains the cure.

I believed this for a long time, that love was the cure for all that ailed me. Having come from an family that failed in its attempts to love me unconditionally, I was in constant search for feeling, for meaning, for something that would grab my heart and rip it out with such fervor that I would finally realize that feelings are good and that I really was alive, not just existing, not just the brunt of someone's idea of a cruel joke. I believed that "love" would make me FEEL something. I tried many things: porn, self-gratification, masochism, gentlemen's clubs, anything to try to make myself feel something. Nothing worked. Luckily I stayed away from drugs and alcohol. Being obsessive-compulsive, I believe that drink would have ruined me completely.

The truth is, in fact, the love is NOT distant and obscure, and worse yet, even if you were able to find it, it turns out it's NOT the cure either. The idea of "love", as defined by society, is a mythological panacea. Having taught us that we are not responsible for our own actions (more on that in a later article), society would have us believe that something other than our own minds and our own selves is responsible for our happiness. Society hopes to convince us that happiness, joy even, is found in things, in other people, in any noun that is defined outside of ourselves.

True happiness, the "Cure" as Eric Carmen calls it, is not found far away and is not intangible. The cure is inside of us each one of us. It is up to us to determine how miserable or felicitous we want to be. If we live our life waiting or hoping for some external influence to change us, then we are living a wasted life. Each one of us has control over our own thoughts, feelings, ideas, perceptions, interactions, emotions, and self-worth. Discard the bad. Hold fast to that which is good. Choose to adopt the positive and divorce yourself from that which is self-deprecating.

The cure is inside.