One of my favorite books is about loneliness. I first read The Lonely City by Olivia Laing almost exactly three years ago. I learned about it from a Brain Pickings post that I read at the beginning of high school. (The post itself is well-worth reading.) I was hooked by the opening line:

“Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like

depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the

fabric of a person.” This resonated with me. I felt intensely lonely, and I associated loneliness with shame—I felt it was my fault or it was something intrinsically wrong with me. I don’t think I admitted I was lonely to my parents until a few years later. My loneliness was a combination of really not fitting in (Chinese immigrant, non-Mormon in a majority-white, Mormon town) and not even wanting to fit in. I looked down on my classmates, who I saw as frivolous, on a lower intellectual level, and basically future-less. (I had a large ego, which is hard to understand, considering I had low self-confidence at the same time. Maybe I tried boosting my self-confidence by stoking my ego with thoughts like “just wait until we grow up and I’m rich.”) I didn’t want to fit in. But I wanted to belong, to feel accepted and to feel like I was “enough.” I carried around a deep, pervasive sense of “lack.” I lacked the social skills. I lacked chill. I lacked social media. Even though I was friends with the few other Asians at my school, I felt like no one understood me—which must be the central platitude of being a tween. The title The Lonely City can be taken two ways: a city is lonely, or loneliness is a city. I was drawn to the latter, to loneliness as “a populated place: a city in itself." That maybe all the lonely people are part of an invisibly city, together. I found so much solace in this book: in Laing’s exploration of loneliness in artists throughout history, in how they built homes and created art out of their loneliness, in how many built something more meaningful from aloneness. I related to it. Loneliness became the theme of most of my early poetry—with varying results. A lot of the time, it was really cliche since I seemed angsty and sad (mood: black nail polish). My poetry was also confusing: it felt like some tragedy had happened outside the poem that the poem refused to address. But I later learned to transfigure loneliness into my poems in subtler ways. Loneliness was the root of my feelings about Asian-American identity, about suburbia, about girlhood, about heritage. I think this became a form of healing for me, or at least a sort of verbalization and expression. Aloneness is a fundamental fact of being human. (Born alone, die alone, single-player game, etc.) Within this aloneness, loneliness comes in waves, at times poignantly painful and at times almost familiar. But I think I’ve learned to better understand loneliness not as a fundamental lack. I see loneliness as natural. It reminds me to spend time and energy and resources connecting with people who care about me and who I care about—not as a “remedy” (as if loneliness is a sickness), but as a source for joy. Coming to terms with loneliness is a sort of freedom to say: I enjoy spending time with myself.

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Here are some of the lines I copied down from The Lonely City when I first read it (the document was created September 17, 2017). Many lines might not make sense alone and without context, but the images still feel like visceral representations of the insularity of loneliness.

Walking home from whatever temporary office I’d found that day, I’d sometimes take a detour by Hamilton Fish Park, where there was a library and a twelve-lane pool, painted a pale flaking blue. I was lonely at the time, lonely and adrift, and this spectral blue space, filling at its corners with blown brown leaves, never failed to tug my heart.



Over the next few weeks he furnishes the café with coffee pots and cherry countertops, the dim reflections in their shined and lacquered surfaces.



It was populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops… It was such a stupid thing to get upset about: a minor artefact of foreignness, of speaking a shared language with a slightly different inflection, a different slant. …I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city. But more often it had to do with language, with the need to communicate, to understand and make myself understood via the medium of speech. The intensity of my reaction–sometimes a blush; more often a full-blown blast of panic—testified to hypervigilance, to the way perception around social interaction had begun to warp. Somewhere in my body, a measuring system had identified danger, and now the slightest glitch in communication was registering as a potentially overwhelming threat. No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonizing about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can’t you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? That’s how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock. Beautiful drawings of golden shoes couldn’t be anything but a retrograde step, frivolous and trivial, though in fact they represented the first stage in Warhol’s assault on distinction itself, the opposition between depth and surface. He was painting things to which he was sentimentally attached, even loved; objects whose value derives not because they’re rare or individual but because they are reliably the same. ‘If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.'

‘the sound of it resonated in my shoes, that instant solitude, that breathing glass wall no one else saw’ Sometimes you can change the psychic space, the landscape of the emotions, by carrying out actions in the physical world. David swimming in a lake, repeatedly dunking his face beneath the surface as nets of light broke across his chest. ‘So simple,’ he wrote, ‘the appearance of night in a room full of strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films, the fracturing of bodies from darkness into light, sounds of plane engines easing into the distance.’ Years before, David used to buy grass seed from a store on Canal Street and roam the piers scattering it in handfuls, Johnny Appleseed in sneakers, wanting to make something beautiful from the rubble…grass scattered with debris, grass growing out of disintegrating plaster and particles of soil. Anonymous art, unsignable art, art that was about transformation, about alchemizing what was otherwise only waste. Often I’d wake at two or three or four in the morning and watch waves of neon pass through my room.

The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others? Easier to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Easier to refuse to make the effort of empathy, to believe instead that the stranger’s body on the sidewalk is simply a render ghost, an accumulation of coloured pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze.