How to Love Being Lonely
Once you slip out of your own skin, it’s kind of wonderful
Because my son is the new kid at a new school, joining mid-year a small group of students who’ve been together since September, he and I have been talking a lot about that special circle of hell known as Feeling Excluded. There may be no human emotion more universal; no experience more exquisitely painful and awkward. So I can’t help but wonder how I ended up in a career that forces me to experience that feeling over and over again.
What does a journalist do? We poke into other worlds and linger and observe, eavesdrop, sidle up to strangers, ask them if they’ll talk to us, and wait for the very strong possibility of total rejection. It’s like reliving the first day of seventh grade in an endless loop. Actually, it’s even worse than that. In seventh grade, everyone is an anxious, pimply newcomer, so you’re all equally miserable. But as a journalist, you’re the only anxious pimply newcomer; when you’re reporting on a group or a subculture or a community, everyone else is in their comfort zone except for you. It can be really, truly lonely.
The first book I wrote, Saturday Night, involved traveling around the country so I could spend Saturday nights with a wide range of people — everyone from teenage club-goers in Los Angeles, to the snobs at a Park Avenue…
