I was at the PolicyLink conference in Maryland with more than 2,500 people in attendance. I was connected to many of them through previous bodies of work, current communities, relationships, and there was even a contingent there from the Seattle area, which is home.
And in the midst of all of this, I found myself feeling all alone.
This feeling of being alone isn’t new to me. It’s one I’ve encountered many times on this creative entrepreneurship journey and in previous roles I’ve held. There’s a reason people say things like, leadership is lonely. We’ve also spent the years since the pandemic talking about a loneliness epidemic. It shows up in all kinds of ways.
And through different iterations of life, I’ve found myself connecting to groups of people in an effort to create community. People I can tap in with. People who understand. People who might make the loneliness feel less lonely. And all of that can be true. Some of those people were even at this particular conference.
And still, I felt all alone.
So I got curious about what that feeling was actually about.
I’ve learned something in this season of life that is different from the way I’ve held loneliness in seasons past. To explain it, I probably need to tell you a little bit about how I learned relationship in the first place.
I grew up in a household as an only child.
Not really, but it often felt that way.
All of my siblings are older than me, and by the time I got into my teenage years, they were out of the house. Which meant, essentially, it was me a lot of the time.
I also wasn’t a kid who fit in particularly well. There were a lot of reasons for that. Seattle isn’t incredibly diverse, and especially so in some of the areas that I grew up in, as a multiracial child in the late ’80s and ’90s.
So here I am. Multiracial. Black. Incredibly light-skinned. Afro. Heavyset. Pigeon-toed.
We didn’t have a lot of resources, so my clothing was often telling a story about my financial positioning in the world before I ever opened my mouth. And I have always been a creative. I didn’t quite fit neatly into any mainline or mainstream.
Every time I did fit in, it felt like I had to conform in some way to fit into the space.
And when I look back, so much of my upbringing, and even much of my adult life, has carried this question:
How do I fit into other people’s containers so I can belong?
I’ve had jobs that felt like this. I’ve been in relationships that felt like this. And it’s in no small part because I learned relational attachment through two primary ways of being: independence and codependence.
Independence, for me, often sounds like: I got it. I don’t need anybody. I can figure it out.
Codependence sounds more like: I got you. Don’t worry about getting me. I got you.
But what is really underneath that is: If I get you, I need you to get me in the same way that I got you. I’m just not going to tell you what I need. I want you to understand my need through the way I serve you.
I don’t think I’m necessarily alone in that reflection.
Both of those ways of being shaped how I moved through the world. If I was going to have people close to me, I believed I needed to be able to meet their needs. And if I couldn’t meet their needs, I couldn’t fully trust them to stay close to me.
Because why would they stay if there wasn’t something in it for them?
And eventually you learn that you can’t trust people to meet needs you haven’t spoken. But rather than speaking the need, sometimes I would just return to: I got it. I got me. You can’t get me. I get me.
So I began creating barriers around myself. If I could be in service to you, you could come inside. If I couldn’t be in service to you, and I couldn’t trust you to somehow know how to be in service to me, you stayed outside.
And what neither independence nor codependence allowed much room for was healthy boundaries. Boundaries that allow people to come in and go out. Boundaries that allow relationship to move.
What I now understand as interdependence.
Because both independence and codependence, at least as I learned them, were built around a fundamental lie:
I am incomplete.
I am not enough.
And I cannot trust that I will be held.
When I believe those things, I experience the world through that gaze. I look at someone and ask, Can they hold me?
No, they can’t hold me.
But maybe I can hold them.
Or I look at someone and decide, I can’t trust them because of the way they’re showing up. There’s something broken there, and I don’t want their brokenness to impact me. So I got this. Let me do my own thing.
These dynamics continued to play out, and it is in no small part connected to the way I was raised and what I witnessed relationally. Both my mother and father, in their own ways, modeled independence and codependence. It was held particularly strongly in my mother’s body and in the way she moved through the world, justifiably so because of what she had to survive.
And yet it passed something on to me.
An understanding that said: If I’m going to be accepted into a group, I need to be in service to that group.
And if the group can’t or won’t accept me?
Don’t worry.
There’ll be another group.
And in between those moments of acceptance?
You got it.
All of this doesn’t just live in ideology.
It lives in my body.
It lives there because I have had many moments of feeling rejected. Feeling like the outsider. Feeling excluded. Feeling like I wasn’t good enough. Feeling like I wasn’t complete enough. Feeling like I couldn’t be held.
Personally and professionally.
So with all of that living in my body, my mind is working overtime in a room of 2,500 people saying: You don’t want to feel that again. You need to figure out how to be in service to this space. Because if you can’t be in service to this space, they don’t need you. And if they don’t need you, you’re going to be all by yourself again.
That nefarious loop continues to play.
But I’m beginning to understand that even the loop is a gift.
Because it continues to bring me back to the same place, time and time again, until I learn the lesson it is holding for me and answer the invitation it is extending.
And the lesson is this:
Absent any contribution, I am enough.
Nobody in that conference space needed anything from me in order for me to belong there. And maybe more importantly, nobody in that space needed me to complete them either.
Because they are already complete.
And when I can begin with the assumption of wholeness in me and wholeness in you, then relationship doesn’t have to be built around my ability to fill your gap or your ability to fill mine.
We can just be close.
We can hold and be held.
Not because either of us is incomplete, but because our wholeness allows for closeness between us.
And the invitation underneath all of this is intimacy.
Intimacy between me and me.
Because I’m beginning to realize that the distancing between me and me is where loneliness starts to percolate.
When I become distant from myself, I can’t see my completeness. I can’t see my enoughness. I can’t trust that I’m held.
But when I come back close to myself, I can begin to see myself as I am again.
The further I drift from me, the more I objectify me.
I begin seeing myself from a distance. And once I’m seeing myself from a distance, I begin comparing.
I compare myself to the crowd. To the collective. To other people in my field.
This may be true for you too. Maybe you compare yourself to other people in school, other people in the relationship pool, or wherever comparison shows up in your experience.
At this conference, I began seeing myself in comparison to everyone else who was there.
I was seeing myself from outside of myself instead of from within myself.
And when I see myself from the outside, that distance allows me to create all kinds of stories about where I am less than. Because comparatively, I can concoct a thousand stories demonstrating where one person may be greater and another may be lesser.
Who belongs more.
Who is more important.
Who knows more people.
Who has more influence.
Who is more needed.
Who has more reason to be in the room.
All in an effort to understand where I should be positioned in the space.
And all of it creating insecurity.
But when I come back to myself, when I answer the invitation toward intimacy between me and me, I begin to reconcile those feelings and return to a place of wholeness.
And in that wholeness, I am held.
In that wholeness, I am known.
In that wholeness, I am in good company.
Even when I am all alone.
Because being alone does not mean I have to be lonely.
When I am in relationship with myself, there is always somewhere I can be where I am in good company.
So for those of you choosing to read this who know this feeling, I want to offer you an invitation.
The next time loneliness pulls up, try seeing it as an invitation.
Not necessarily an immediate instruction to find another person. Not evidence that something is wrong. Not proof that you don’t belong.
Maybe it is an invitation toward a more intimate relationship with yourself.
A closer relationship with yourself.
Draw near to you.
And get curious about what you see.
See if you can witness your completeness.
Your enoughness.
And all the ways everything has held you through every one of your days.
And maybe, in drawing closer to yourself, you’ll discover that even when you’re alone, you are still in good company.