I’ve been trying to outrun loneliness for as long as I can remember.

One summer afternoon when I was seven or eight, I called my parents crying. My grandparents had been busy with their middle-age lives. I’d fed their horse apples and fished in a nearby pond until I couldn’t take it anymore. The loneliness vanished as my dad and little sister pulled into the driveway.

In middle school, I’d play video games with my best friend Matt. We’d stay up as late as we could. Because sleep meant disconnection — and loneliness.

Then I found songs. Lonely, nighttime songs. The Early November’s “Sunday Drive.” Ryan Adams’s “September.” Dylan’s “You’re a Big Girl Now.” I’d drive Southern Maryland backroads writing my own in my head.

If my band had a show coming up, I was okay. There was something to look forward too. To strive for. Something that all the work and practice and boredom in between was serving.

Along the way I hurt people. I expected them to make me feel less lonely. When they inevitably didn’t, I was pushy and needy and sometimes angry.

Now, it’s Friday nights. No plans and I’m a wreck. I text friends for some sort of connection. I scroll social media, assuming the relative quiet means everyone else is up to something special. I mostly just feel like shit. I pour some tequila or smoke a joint.

Plain-old plans aren’t even enough. My perfect Friday night is a dinner party with close friends, fix or six tops. Good food. Meaningful conversation. Deep connection. I need to be seen and heard. And I need to see and hear. (The pandemic has made this almost impossible, of course.)

Saturday morning comes and I’m back to my routines. Operating under the assumption that some future moment will finally be “it.” Saturday morning isn’t “it.” Monday mornings or Thursday evenings aren’t either. They’re preparation for whenever “it” happens; whatever “it” is.

By Friday night, I’m exhausted. Suddenly, this is it. This, right here, right now, is my life. So it has to be deep and meaningful. If it’s not, then I’ll be lonely forever. My mind sneers: you’re going to be 75 years old and still alone, watching football in a house somewhere in a gray, nameless suburb.

But I’m starting to glimpse another way. Another way of relating to that scared, lonely kid still inside of me. Because he is part of me. And never going away.

As the poet Nayyirah Waheed writes:

there is you and you.
this is a relationship.
this is the most important relationship.

What helps is imagining that kid beside me. Wrapping my arm around him and listening to what he has to say.

“For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety,” writes psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. “Being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart.”

That’s why deep, meaningful connection is so soothing to me on a Friday night. It’s a pacifier for that scared, lonely kid.

I’m learning how to give that to myself. To self-soothe. Imagining my arm around that kid calms me down. Picking up the guitar softens my shoulders. Taking a hot shower makes me feel held by something larger than myself.

And thank God for my meditation practice. It’s helped me get to know my inner world. All my different parts. The loneliness. The striving to be perfect. The self-righteous anger. The people pleasing.

Mindfulness takes a little bit of the charge out of the thoughts. Creates some distance between them and me. Makes them less believable.

Like getting up from the front row of a movie theater and walking to the back. You realize the thoughts are just images on a screen. As Nepalese Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche says, they’re “real but not true.”

My worries about being lonely forever are real — they’re appearing in my mind. But they aren’t necessarily true.

Which allows me to choose how to relate to my loneliness. Rather than following those same old patterns that haven’t served me since I was a little, lonely, scared kid.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly email newsletter helps you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

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One of my favorite stories comes from spiritual teacher David Deida. At a party, he saw his mentor’s wife enjoying a conversation with an attractive man.

“Aren’t you jealous?” he asked his mentor.

“Yes,” his mentor responded. “But the fact that I’m jealous isn’t bothering me.”

In other words, the mentor was aware of how he was relating to his jealousy. Instead of making the emotion a problem, he was allowing it to just be there.

I love that story because I make everything a problem. When I’m sad, part of me says I should be happy. When I’m exhausted after work, part of me says I should still be working. (Thanks, capitalism.) When I’m lonely, part of me thinks I’ll be lonely forever.

That’s if I’m able to notice the emotion to begin with. Often, I’m completely blended, a concept from a form of therapy called Internal Family Systems. (More on that here.)

When I’m blended — overwhelmed, triggered, etc. — I’m caught up in my thoughts, believing they’re true. They’re like a movie. And I’ve forgotten the actual me is on the couch watching a TV screen.

Jealousy? I’m an expert in catastrophizing about how people don’t love me anymore.

One time, an ex-girlfriend and I went to a Washington Capitals hockey game. Who was sitting beside us? The team’s most popular former player, Peter Bondra.

My ex, a curious and remarkable person, struck up a conversation and had Bondra laughing in his Slovakian accent.

Does she think he’s in better shape than me? my mind sneered. Is it his perfectly tailored suit? I need to dress better. At least I’m a little taller than him.

Honestly, in past romantic relationships, I was more often than not lost in a virtual reality of thoughts, judgements, and assumptions.

That’s why mindfulness is so powerful. After meditation, it’s a little easier to unblend from my swirling thoughts. I can see them as they really are: not reality, but boring, two-dimensional ideas about the world.

“The movement from virtual reality — thoughts — to the awareness of sense-based reality is true homecoming,” says meditation teacher Tara Brach.

When I’m unblended, I’m in my senses — in my body. I’m seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling, and listening. Colors, sensations, tastes, smells, and sounds become more interesting than anything my mind can produce.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

As Brach says, this moment-by-moment awareness can be home-like. I can always return to the aliveness of the present moment, no matter what’s happening.

But emotions are seductive. They fly in and hijack your nervous system, triggering an area of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala then tells your body to release stress hormones.

Your breath shortens and heart pounds. Your muscles tense up in areas of the body like the stomach and shoulders. You’re ready to fight a hockey player. Or at least ruminate until you can complain about it later.

Emotions even layer on top of each other. The jealousy is one thing. Then there’s the criticism, the making jealousy a problem.

That’s the big takeaway from Deida’s story. Sometimes you have to start with the self-criticism. It’s standing in the way of the jealousy, the anger, the loneliness, the sadness.

“What’s known as the inner critic, what Freud called the superego, is but one of many parts of the personality responsible for keeping you safe,” writes therapist Richard Schwartz. “Most often it’s criticizing you to motivate you to achieve, look good, be tough, and so forth, so you won’t be hurt or rejected.”

And sure enough, making it a problem won’t work either. Your inner critic needs loving just like the parts of you that are scared or hurt or jealous. It needs to be seen, understood, and soothed, like the little inner child it is.

Deida’s mentor wasn’t some otherworldly guru. No one is. He’d simply done the work to get to know his inner critic. I bet his inner critic was blaring in his mind as his wife smiled and played with her hair. He just wasn’t listening to it. He was unblended.

To be sure, self-compassion won’t make you weak or soft or a pushover. If anything, it’s made me stronger.

Unblended, Deida’s mentor could decide to intervene or discuss the situation with his wife after the party. Or he could decide not to. He was in a better position to choose his response to what was actually happening, not what was on the movie screen in his head.

When you’re not under the sway of your emotions, you’ll be able to access the confidence, the calmness, the curiosity, the wisdom, all the things us human beings are capable of.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly emails will help you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation transformed my life.

Photo by Nano Anderson