hello, i'm lonely

exploring black loneliness through my own

Lonely in Natchez, Mississippi along the banks of the Mississippi River at sunset | August 2024.

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hello, i’m lonely.

What an embarrassing fucking thing to admit.

But I wanted to start this year—and this wider creative project—being more honest than is comfortable or convenient. I’ve spent most of my writing career, this year marking 20 years writing professionally which sounds almost unbelievable, spilling my guts online.

I did it in far too personal essays published in xoJane (among other outlets) that were exploitative due to how little I was paid and how edits never took into account my emotional and mental safety. Then I overshared intimate rambles on Twitter, some of those tweets or longer threads going viral, instilling into me this lopsided logic and incentive that what I was doing was good or even real.

And in some respects it was. But despite the honesty, I never seemed to be able to break that impenetrable third wall. Admitting my persistent loneliness is wrapped up in all of this.

I have a tenuous relationship with solitude and being alone. For most of my life, I avoided it because it felt too damn sad. As a child I had ferocious feelings and being alone reminded me of the isolation that is being forced to process alone. Because those feelings are too much of a nuisance. To your parents, to your siblings, extended family, teachers, countless community members.

You get shamed one too many times for having an understandable emotional reaction, for being saddened and enraged, and you’re labeled as that little girl. That one who cries or screams or dare shows the world her rage and frustration. And that little girl grows into a woman who feels deeply but far away from the rest of the world. Her emotions are strong enough to soar among the stars but they remain locked in a cage, the only space where they can be contained and understood. And not belittled.

My solitude became a badge of honor. A “look at me! I’m alone and not afraid!” that for some time was true and something I held with pride. Hell, the former Substack I had on here was called loneful—an attempt to reframe the loneliness I didn’t feel nor had to recognize that was constantly projected onto me. Patriarchy tells women that we are nothing without our association and connection to men. Value judgements like those are more intense with loud ass feeling Black women like me.

Crossing the threshold of my 30s meant swearing off the obsessive dating I did throughout my 20s, convinced that trying harder and being more focused on love like I did with my career would yield me proverbial gold. I wanted people to pat me on the back and congratulate me for finding some kinda freedom. But my freedom was fleeting until grief and trauma entered the room. And grief and trauma, with their many lessons and pains, introduced me to depths of loneliness.

This is the last year of my 30s. Next year I will be 40. And when I look back at this third decade of life, I’m astonished at all the loss I’ve endured and survived. At 31, my dearest and closest friend was killed in a car accident. She was only 30-years-old. At 34, one of my dearest Aunties died from cancer. At 35, my Dad died. At 37, my Mom died. Loss has forever changed my internal landscape, riddled it with knots of isolation, preventing me from being open.

Before, as a Black woman, my loneliness could only have been understood in a patriarchal sense, in relation to men. If I said I was lonely, people pitied me because I seemed to be in an inescapable drought of intimate romantic connection. But I have learned that there are so many other forms of it, so many other ways to feel deeply alone in this world as a Black woman.

There’s the loneliness of experience, as not many people can share the experience of having lost both of her parents and her closest friend before she turns 40. The loneliness of emotional landscape, as your experiences are so far from what those around you can relate to, so how in the hell could they even attempt to comfort you if they can’t comprehend where your pain springs forth from? There’s the inherent loneliness of living with compounded, longterm trauma from those who may not have had to create sophisticated coping mechanisms to survive those real threats time and time again. There’s the loneliness of grief because yes, no one grieves exactly like you do so it will always be a room and party of one that no one else can enter or attend. And perhaps most crushing is the loneliness of disbelief, of those not being able to step outside of their perception of you as “strong”, friendly, engaging, magnetic and remarkably resilient to see the suffering beneath.

These forms of loneliness, personal to me while applicable to other Black loners, differ from how isolation is typically understood and discussed in our culture. Mainstream discourse on loneliness typically centers on individual impact or the use of social media to escape it; finger wags in an air of misogynistic condescension towards women who are supposedly lonely because marriage and kids seem far away. Black loneliness emerges from particular historical and cultural contexts: containing emotion in a world that denies Black feeling, experiencing loss earlier and more frequently than our peers as the trauma and stress of racism robs our life expectancy, being seen as strong when we need support most. Our loneliness isn't just about being alone; it's about navigating a world that demands our emotional labor while denying our emotional realities.

A few weekends ago, I finally sat with the “Stax: Soulsville, USA” four-part documentary that had been saved on my list for eons. Otis Redding was featured prominently in the first two episodes, including chronicling his untimely death at 26-years-old due to a plane crash in Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin. One thing that struck me was an aside from Booker T. Jones on Redding’s biggest hit, “Sitting On The Dock of The Bay”. Jones said, about the posthumous hit, “There was a deep loneliness within him and that was one of the sources of these original songs.”

When I heard those words it triggered my own recognition. Of last summer traveling to Natchez, Mississippi for a long weekend to learn about Black history to inform future writing. Positioning my laptop in the bathroom of my room in a historic inn I stayed in, with a four poster bed, elegant draping and a fireplace that didn’t make sense to use. The bathroom floors were cold and slick underneath my feet, colder when water from my before dinner shower speckled in transparent dots under the flickering lightbulb above my head. I played that song over and over again, for nearly half an hour, letting the words wash over my soul.

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Lonely in Natchez, Mississippi along the banks of the Mississippi River at sunset | August 2024.

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When I drove to dinner, I had clarity that this song, one that I have loved and many have loved, was about the deep loneliness that you only get if you get it. And I got it. It was shocking to know and to feel that in his words because it meant I was irredeemably lonely, too. That, for me, was an opening, my first awareness of my loneliness. A starred point of entry reordered the experience I’d been having that I’d been naively chalking up to simply grief and trauma. That was the first time I allowed myself to know and wonder if loneliness had overtaken my life without me knowing. Without me seeing it and then naming it.

Because if someone as jovial as Otis Redding, a man who was known for being gregarious, ambitious and was immensely talented beyond his years; one who had a beautiful 300-acre property farm called “Big O Ranch", located right outside of Macon, Georgia, in Round Oak, Georgia, with his chickens, his wife and children; one who appeared to have an abundant life speckled in warmth. If he struggled with his loneliness in the shadows, then maybe anyone could be lonely. Maybe I could be, too, despite how people see me, despite how I see myself.

Because it is not unusual to put down my phone to read or do anything else and for nothing to be waiting for me once I pick it back up. It is not unusual for me to go entire weekends with no contact from anyone. It is not unusual for no one to check in for weeks or months to ask how I’m doing and to care enough to wait for the honest answer. It is not unusual and thus I am not unusual for having these real fears of being stuck here forever without anyone to reach for me.

Yes, I blame myself for falling into this hell of horrors—the seduction of isolation. Burrowing further within yourself to shield from more disappointment feels so safe, so protective that you don’t realize what’s happening until you’re locked in a barren cave of your own making. A mountain that has been made into a molehill of melancholy.

I watch myself turning down the few invites from new or older friends that trickle through to hang out even though I claim to want the opposite: connection. I don’t know how to tell these people that I’m mad that they woke up and remembered me after so much time of forgetting. I’m pissed; I’m untrusting. I use pleasantries, cheerful turn downs or cold silence instead to be left alone. More alone than I already feel.

And I seem, despite all their and my prodding, to be unable to easily lift myself out. But then I remember—how could I not turn to isolation and thus loneliness instinctively when loss after loss and grief after grief and trauma after trauma brought the same predictable pattern? Of extraordinary care and attentiveness, loving words and promises to support, less and less calls and texts until none at all, silence yet again so quickly that the kindness offered feels like both a fever dream and whiplash?

A few weeks ago, I hungrily devoured Audre Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals” in one sitting. This was part curiosity, part in assigning myself to read, analyze and annotate this text for the low-res MFA program that I started in December. Like many millennials, I realized that my inability to finish more books is not the result of my disinterest but in my barely there attention span due to social media scrolling. Being able to finish this book so quickly startled me, just as much as the sob I let out once I closed the cover.

The text is vulnerable throughout as Lorde describes in detail her journey of diagnosis and surviving cancer. What stirred me most was her refusal to let her pain and fear about cancer “fossilize into yet another silence” and insisting on drawing her strength from a dark experience. But she goes even further as the pages progress:

“I have come to believe that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. [...] Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. [...] And, of course, I am afraid—you can hear it in my voice— because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.”

As I dig myself out of the pit of loneliness, as I push aside the fear of this admittance, as I shrivel out of the carcass that is the spiral of shame, there are more tales of Black people who remain there and Black people who never made it out. I plan to write from this liminal space, reorienting this idea of loneliness to only be a gendered or white experience. But one that runs the full swath of Black experience. Black people are not a monolith—whether we’re speaking about Black women like me or Black men who suffer specifically under patriarchal expectations of stoicism—and neither are our experiences with loneliness and isolation.

I’m starting slowly with one longread essay every two weeks. It’ll come with other thoughts on loneliness from different types of media—visual, audio, writing. For now, all essays, or issues, will be free, but I welcome your support with a paid monthly or annual subscription if you see strength in what I’m trying to do.

And yes, I’ve been openly critical about Substack for years and those criticisms remain. Tech fascism for most online platforms is our reality now—my compromise is housing this project here temporarily to reach the readers it needs to reach, getting my own domain to retain independence (in-progress) and ultimately moving this project elsewhere once I have clarity on its ultimate direction.

Join me in exploring the black alone.