Always Functioning, Never Formed

In my youth, you see, I was what one would call a self-afflicted loner, choosing of my own will and preference to live in unremarkable solitude, barred safely within the impenetrable and firmly unyielding sanctity of my inner world. I refused, with almost religious fervor, to make acquaintance with reality — with its triumphs and failures, its wonders and mysteries, its trials and viciously terrible tribulations, its pessimistic afflictions and bleak prospects, its endless descent into moral and intellectual decay, and the people that inhabited it with all their wickedness and vice and corruption and sin. My inner world, I thought, was vast and peacefully bucolic enough for me to live an entire lifetime within, untouched and undisturbed, away by an infinitely safe distance from discomforting truths. For I was always averse to discomfort. Even the slightest iota of it was abhorrent to me, and reality more than anything else, I had come to learn, was overflowing with profound discomfort that one could only barely dream away. Only the deftest of dreamers could dream themselves far enough from the bared fangs of reality to live sanctimoniously in false contentment amidst preferred imaginings. And I fancied myself the deftest dreamer there was. I was alone, yes, but never to the point of misery — or so I believed for a sizable portion of my youth. I called myself an introvert. A happy loner. A content loner. Looking back now with the cruel clarity hindsight affords, I see plainly that this was a lie, though an exceedingly convincing one. Happiness in loneliness was only a mirage, a deceitful illusion born from mistaken self-affirmation and unchallenged cowardice. For only misery and the devil himself truly thrive in unequivocal solitude. The lie endured because it concealed itself behind a sweet yet repulsively flimsy mask of self-sufficiency. I had mistaken avoidance for peace. I had mistaken emotional retreat for introspection. Most disastrously of all, I had mistaken fear for personality. I was not an introvert. I was a coward. Confidence, you see, is an uncertain concept for one so inclined toward solitude. Abjectly deprived of the real world and the endless spectrum of interactions and relationships it offers, the solitary man can only make judgments about himself through presupposed notions of his own disposition. He becomes judge, jury, and executioner of imagined versions of himself, conducting careful simulations within the confines of his mind and mistaking them for empirical truth. The scientific method long ago established that a hypothesis can never become law without experimentation and evidence, yet the self-afflicted loner is philosophically antithetical to experimentation. He places blind faith in theoretical versions of himself while avoiding practical verification at all costs. He is certain of himself, yet never enough to test whether he is correct. So it was with me. I convinced myself thoroughly that my solace resided solely in solitary pursuits and that I possessed neither need nor desire to leave the comforts of my confinement to face the ever-lurking threat of discomfort that reality presented. But in truth, it was never solitude I loved — only safety. That is the tragedy of the self-afflicted loner. He becomes a man of no confirmed talents. Not profoundly good at anything, yet not empirically terrible either. He chooses the safety of uncertainty over the disappointment of fruitless effort and the stabbing discomfort of truth. He has no triumphs to celebrate, but likewise no failures to mourn. He remains suspended in a stagnant state of perpetual hypotheticality. And because he never truly lives, he never truly loses. Cowardice grants him that mercy. For the earliest years of my tenure as a blissfully cowardly loner, I remained mostly indifferent to the happenings of reality passing outside the windows of my confinement. The occasional glance outward frankly left much to be desired. The little town of Bauchi, in which I was born and had resided for two decades, was as strange to me as it would be to a man visiting for a week. I was more acquainted with the patterns of interlocking bricks upon the sidewalks — patterns I felt a terribly compulsive urge to walk according to — than I was with the actual people and places around me. I went to school, ran errands, embarked upon mind-clearing strolls, and nothing more. I was merely a spectator in life, passively watching as it ebbed away with the inertia of time. Occasionally, storms from the outside world gained sufficient momentum to penetrate my defenses, carrying with them tales of cruelty, failure, betrayal, corruption, heartbreak, and despair. The miasmic odor of life’s evils overwhelmed me, and so I shut my windows tighter still and bolstered my walls further. Yet every so often, a mild zephyr slipped through the infinitesimal cracks. And with it came sweeter scents. Triumph. Camaraderie. Laughter. Hope. I smelled friendship before I ever experienced it. I smelled love long before I ever touched it. And though faint, those scents lingered. For all my life I had deprived myself of the joys supposedly found in human connection. Friendship. Camaraderie. Romance. “What joy?” I once arrogantly pondered. I believed myself already sufficiently content, as happy as one needed to remain reasonably sane. But contentment, I would later discover, is not the same thing as fulfillment. A man can survive in emotional isolation much the same way a starving man can survive on scraps. Survival is not flourishing. Endurance is not living. I watched others take risks, make mistakes, suffer humiliations, pursue ambitions, confess feelings, endure heartbreaks, and stumble repeatedly through life’s discomforts. Sometimes they failed spectacularly. Other times they prevailed magnificently. Yet I envied none of them because I considered the triumphs unworthy of the suffering required to attain them. Coward that I was, I wished to prevail without risking failure. But reality grants no such bargains. Only those willing to suffer uncertainty are permitted genuine connection. Only those willing to risk rejection may experience love. Only those willing to fail may ever truly succeed. And so the myth of solace in solitude slowly began to unravel before me. I realized then that my isolation had never been born from profound self-sufficiency or introversion or philosophical transcendence above the needs of ordinary people. It was fear. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of rejection. Fear of inadequacy. Fear of discomfort. I had hidden from life and named the hiding virtue. That was the lie. And perhaps the cruelest part of all is this: the world I spent so long avoiding was never nearly as terrifying as the version of it I had constructed within my imagination. The discomforts I dreaded were real, yes, but survivable. The failures were painful but temporary. The heartbreaks cut deeply but healed eventually. The true danger had never been reality. It had been stagnation. For only if one tries can one fail. But likewise, only if one tries can one ever truly live.

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