A good friend of mine recently posed this question to me in an email:

Sometimes you can be around people and continue to feel alone, like nobody understands. So hopefully that doesn’t happen to you. If it does, what does that mean? Mis-perception? I ask this question honestly because trauma can do weirdness to perception.

This feeling of alone-ness, not being understood, I’ve come to call existential alienation, and I’ve felt this way my whole life.

I don’t believe it’s a matter of low self-worth, even though it feels like something of value is diminished around others. A person can have a healthy sense of self and yet still feel that alone-ness among others. I don’t think it’s about what I think of myself or what I think about others. Nor do I believe it has to do with how I perceive what others think of me. It’s not a form of self-centredness, but it could be the product of social anxiety. Then again, it’s just as possible that it is the cause of social anxiety.

I fought against it. I drank to drown it out. Living each day in an episode of Cheers, I sought places where everyone knew my name and were always glad I came, where our troubles were all the same. And I fell in love, over and over, to try and keep that dreadful alienation at bay. Through spiritual gatherings, I searched for community and a more collective and egalitarian way of life. I studied Marxism and learned about the alienation of human labour. All my attempts to distract myself from the alone-ness or to understand it fell in vain. So what is it?

Existential alienation arises from the sense that I need a certain quality of human connection that doesn’t normally exist in our society, or maybe in life.

I’ve come close to healing that alienation a couple of times. First, was when I was training to become a Reiki master. Everything felt magical during that time (it was), and it seemed I was energetically connected to all. I was also well into my alcoholism during that period. The second instance of healing was during the first few years of recovery, when I turned my will and life over to a power greater than myself. My reality was the experience of living in light, feeling it within myself, and seeing that light in others. I’d been agnostic my whole life, but I was nearly destroyed by alcoholism so I was willing to believe. I eventually lost that willingness—I was conflicted because I couldn’t reconcile my newfound spirituality with my deep-seated agnosticism and scepticism. Today, I don’t believe the answer to existential alienation lies in any sort of magical thinking.

What if there is no answer to existential alienation? Could it be possible that a solution is elusive because there isn’t one? Could it simply be an unalterable fact of being human?

Maybe existential alienation is what drives each of us to reach out, to love, to connect, to drink, to escape, to hide, to work, to play, to run, to pray, to meditate, to create, to procreate, to paint, to sing, to write… to be human.