How can I stop feeling so alone?

This morning, the answer came.

To my question. The one I asked YOU yesterday. Everyone has a question that they ask themselves many times, every day. What is your question?

I hadn’t asked myself that question in a while. (This is one of the reasons why I love to write and post. By asking others to look at something, we force ourselves to look at it, too.)

So here’s my question. And no, I’m not happy with it, though I think I’ve found a temporary answer.

How do I stop feeling so alone?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years and decades. No, it’s a question I’ve been asking, without words, since the day I was born.

That day, 43 years ago — after being born perfectly healthy — I was put in an ambulance, alone, and sent across the city of Boston, to another hospital.

There I spent the first three days of my life, in a plastic box, under florescent lights, hooked up to tubes and machines.

Though big and perfectly healthy, I was being monitored because of the fears of a nervous aunt and father, who thought I looked “too blue.” And because the incubator was a new medical technology that, while saving the lives of millions of premature babies, was overused in the 1970s and 1980s.

Good hospitals no longer do what they did with me. And while most have forgotten about this unhealthy trend in history, my body still remembers. But in the words of Megan Elizabeth Morris, when I bless my challenges, they bless me back.

Yet still I ask. Over and over. How can I stop feeling so alone?

How can I get the love I crave? How can I get the love I need?

The extreme isolation of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023… which looked a lot like my childhood… and now - after a year and a half as a digital nomad… has had me asking this question a lot.

Every time I make a choice about where to go. Every time I book a new room in a new town.

Will I feel less alone in this airbnb? Will I find a friend in this place? Will I find the love I want — here?

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As so often happens, the question can only be heard when an answer arrives. Or because the answer was said out loud, by two different people.

The first was in a hostel in Cordoba. A woman, like me - who worked online, was separated, single, and middle-aged.

You need to learn to be with people, she said, with the warm, heartfelt but brutal honesty that’s normal in this country I love.

And again - from my new friend here in Mendoza.

You need to stop moving. You need to stay in one place long enough to meet people. You need to stay, if you want to make the friends you want to have.

To find the love you crave.

And so it is. I listened. And I have decided to stay.

Staying requires that I accept some things I don’t want - like living in a big city. I would much rather live in the countryside. But I walk in Mendoza’s amazing central park every single day.

And here, at last, I have found many things worth staying for.

New friends. A possible job as a yoga teacher. A room in a ceramic/yoga studio where I can hold in-person classes, full of plants to care for and people to meet.

Beings to love. A in-person community to help grow.

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Perhaps it’s time to ask myself some new questions.

How can I help you feel less alone as you create and connect in English?

Will I have the courage to create the online community I have been wanting to build for nearly two years?

Will I finally create the space that might help you feel less alone - as you create in community, connecting with yourselves and each other and/with your English?

I’ve been part of many communities in person. Now, perhaps, I’ve found another in-person community I want to help build. Around a yoga studio. In a place. In a new home.

All I need to do is stay. And say yes. When sometimes, for me, it’s easier to say no. And to run.

But maybe, just maybe, when I feel less alone in the real world — I’ll find the courage to finally build the online community you deserve.

It seems that’s the way it works.

Or at least, may it be so.