3 Little Reminders That Will Make You Feel Way Less Alone

3 Little Reminders That Will Make You Feel Way Less Alone
IN THE MIDST of bad days and hard times, it’s easy to look around and see a bunch of people who seem to be
doing perfectly fine. Things are not as perfect as they seem. We’re all struggling in our own unique way, every
single day. And if we could just be brave enough to open up about it, and talk to each other more often, we’d
realize that we are not alone in feeling lost and alone with our issues.
So many of us are fighting a similar battle right now. Try to remember this. No matter how embarrassed or
uneasy you feel about your own situation, others are out there experiencing the same emotions. When you hear
yourself say, “I am all alone,” it’s just your troubled subconscious mind trying to sell you a lie.
There’s always someone who can relate to you.
There’s always someone who understands.
Perhaps you can’t immediately talk to them, but they are out there.
We are out there.
The whole reason we wrote these words is because we often feel and think and struggle much like you do.
We care about many of the things you care about, just in our own way. And although some people do not
understand us, we understand each other.
You are definitely not alone!
We are not alone!
And to further assure you of this, let us tell you a quick story about a strong and beautiful woman we know
who has recently felt alone too.
What She Desires Most
She notices the people sitting in a small sports bar across the street. They’re cheering and chatting. They look
so alive. She wants to cross the street to join these people, just to connect with them—to be a part of
something. But a subtle voice that comes from within, that whispers from the open wounds in her heart, holds
her back from doing so. So she keeps walking. Alone.
She walks to the end of the city center, where she sees a dirt path that leads up a grassy hill. The hill, she
knows, overlooks a spiritual sanctuary. But it isn’t the sanctuary she wants to visit tonight—not yet anyway. It’s
a warm, breezy Saturday night, and she wants to find a place outdoors with sufficient light so that she can sit
and read the book she’s grasping in her right hand.
But reading isn’t what she really wants. Not deep down. What she really wants is for someone—anyone at
all—to tap her on the shoulder and invite her into their world. To ask her questions and tell her stories. To be
interested. To understand her. To laugh with her. To want her to be a part of their life.
At the deepest level, in the core of her soul, what she desires most is to know that she’s not alone in the
world. That she truly belongs. And that whatever she was put here to do, in time it will be done and shared with
others who deeply care.
An Unsustainable Past
This young woman left a substantial segment of her life behind to be in this small city tonight. A few months
earlier, she was engaged to a strapping young businessman, with whom she owned a fast-growing start-up
company, working long, hard days and enjoying the fruits of their labor together with a deepening community of
friendships in Manhattan.
In a period of just a few months, she and her fiancé split up and decided that it was easiest to shut down
the company and divide the monetary remains rather than attempt co-ownership. As they began the process of
shutting down the company, she learned that most of the seemingly deep friendships she had made in
Manhattan were tied directly to her old business affairs or her business-socialite of an ex-fiancé.
While this young woman didn’t consciously expect such a rapid and painful series of events, it also wasn’t
totally unexpected. Subconsciously she knew that she had created a life for herself that was unsustainable. It
was a life centered on her social status, in which all her relationships brought with them a mounting and
revolving set of expectations. This life left no time for spiritual growth or deep connection or love.
Yet this young woman is drawn to spirituality, connection, and love. She has been drawn to these things all
her life. And the only thing that steered her off course into this unsustainable lifestyle was the careless belief
that if she did certain things and acted in certain ways, she would be worthy in the eyes of others. That her
social status would procure lasting admiration from others. And that she would never feel alone.
She realizes now how wrong she was.
The Sanctuary
The young woman walks up a steep paved road on the outskirts of the city center. She feels the burn in her calf
muscles as she marches higher and higher. The road is, at first, filled with quaint boutiques and young couples
and friends, but as it advances uphill, they give way to small cottage homes and kids playing with flashlights in
the street. She keeps marching higher and higher until she reaches a clearing where there is a small public
park.
In this park, a group of teenagers are huddled around two guitarists, who are strumming and singing an
acoustic melody. “Is it a popular song?” she thinks to herself. She isn’t sure because she hasn’t had time lately
to listen to music. She wants to join the group. She wants to tell the guitarists that their music is incredible. But
she hesitates. She just can’t find the nerve to walk over to them.
Instead, she sits on a park bench a few hundred feet away. The bench overlooks the cityscape below. She
stares off into the distance and up into the night sky for several minutes, thinking and breathing. And she begins
to smile, because she can see the spiritual sanctuary. It’s dark outside, but the sanctuary shines bright. She can
see it clearly. She can feel its warmth surrounding her. And although she knows the sanctuary has existed for an
eternity, her heart tells her something that stretches a smile across her cheeks: “This sanctuary is all yours
tonight.”
Not in the sense that she owns it. Nor in the sense that it isn’t also a sanctuary for millions of other people
around the world. But rather in the sense that it belongs to all of us as part of our heritage, exclusively tailored
for every human being and our unique needs and beliefs. It’s a quiet refuge that, when we choose to pay
attention, exists all around us and within us. We can escape to it at any time. It’s a place where we can dwell
with the good spirits and guardian angels who love us unconditionally and guide us even when we feel lost and
alone.
Especially when we feel lost and alone.
Reminders for When You Feel Lost & Alone
We hope this short story makes you feel less alone. We hope it gives you hope. But assuming you need a little
extra perspective right now—because sometimes we all do—we want to shift gears and cover a few practical
reminders we often examine with our course students:
1. Every passing face on the street represents a story every bit as captivating,
complicated, and crazy as yours.
Remember that everyone has a story. Everyone has gone through something that’s unexpectedly changed them
and forced them to grow. Everyone you meet has struggled, and continues to struggle in some way, and to
them, it’s just as hard as what you’re going through.
Marc was lucky enough to have a very wise grandmother who coached him through this reality when he was
just a teenager. And he was smart enough to write a journal entry about the conversation he had with her, so
he could remember her wisdom decades later. Here’s a little taste of that conversation from Marc’s journal:
I sat there in her living room staring at her through teary eyes. “I feel lost and alone and completely
out of my mind,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Why do you feel that way?” she delicately asked.
“Because I’m neurotic and self-conscious and regretful, and so much more all at once,” I said.
“And you don’t think everyone feels the way you do sometimes?” she asked.
“Not like this!” I proclaimed.
“Well, honey, you’re wrong,” she said. “If you think you know someone who never feels the way
you do right now—who never feels a bit lost and alone, and downright confused and crazy—you just
don’t know enough about them. Every one of us contains a measure of ‘crazy’ that moves us in
strange, often perplexing ways. This side of us is necessary; it’s part of our human ability to think,
adapt, and grow. It’s part of being intelligent,” she said. “No great mind has ever existed without a
touch of this kind of madness.”
I sat silently for a moment. My eyes gazed from her eyes to the ground and back to her eyes
again. “So you’re saying I should want to feel like this?”
“To an extent,” she said. “Let me put it this way: Taking all your feelings seriously all the time,
and letting them drive you into misery, is a waste of your incredible spirit. You alone get to choose
what matters and what doesn’t. The meaning of everything in your life is the meaning you give it.”
“I guess,” I replied under my breath.
She continued, “And sometimes how you feel simply won’t align with how you want to feel—it’s
mostly just your subconscious mind’s way of helping you look at things from a different perspective.
These feelings will come and go quickly as long as you let them go . . . as long as you consciously
acknowledge them and then push through them. At least that’s what I’ve learned to do for myself,
out of necessity, on a very regular basis. So you and I are actually struggling through this one
together, honey. And I’m also pretty certain we’re not the only ones.”
We shared another moment of silence, then my lips curled up slightly, and I cracked a smile.
“Thank you, Grandma,” I said.
2. You are far more than that one broken piece of you.
When times are tough, and some piece of you is chipped and broken, it’s easy to feel like everything—all of you
—is broken along with it. But that’s not true.
We all have this picture in our minds of ourselves—this idea of what kind of person we are. When this idea
gets even slightly harmed or threatened, we react defensively and oftentimes irrationally. People may question
whether we did a good job, and this threatens our idea of being a competent person, so we become angry or
hurt by the criticism. Someone falsely accuses us of something and this damages our idea that we’re a good
person, and so we get angry and attack the other person, or we cower and cry. And the list goes on.
But the craziest thing is, oftentimes we are actually the ones harming and threatening ourselves with
negativity and false-accusations.
Just this morning, Marc was struggling to motivate himself to work on a new creative project he’d been
procrastinating doing. So his identity of himself as someone who is always productive and motivated and has
great ideas suddenly came under attack. When he realized he wasn’t getting things done, it made him feel
terribly self-conscious and uncertain, because he began subconsciously worrying that he wasn’t who he thought
he was. And this, in turn, made him feel very alone inside.
His solution was to realize that he’s not just one thing. He’s not always productive—sometimes he is, but
sometimes he’s unproductive too. He’s not always motivated—sometimes he is, but other times he can be a bit
lazy or simply in need of some downtime. And obviously he doesn’t always have great ideas either—because
that’s impossible.
The truth is, each of us can be many things, and remembering this helps us stretch our identity so it’s not so
fragile—so it doesn’t completely shatter when a small piece of it gets chipped. Then it doesn’t matter if
someone occasionally thinks we didn’t do a good job, or if we sometimes catch ourselves not doing a good job—
because we’ve already accepted that, like everyone else, we’re only human.
We make mistakes.
We are less than perfect.
Just like you .
And that’s perfectly okay.
3. There are people in this world who desperately need your support right now.
We all have the tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe and to see everything from the
viewpoint of how it affects us. But this can have all kinds of adverse effects, from feeling sorry for ourselves
when things aren’t going exactly as planned, to doubting ourselves when we aren’t perfect, to feeling lost and
alone with our issues when we’re having a bad day or going through hard times.
So whenever we catch ourselves lingering at the center in an adverse state of mind, we do our best to
briefly shift our focus away from our own issues and onto other people around us that we might be able to help.
Finding little ways to help others gets us out of self-centered thinking, and then we’re not wallowing alone in
self-pity anymore—we start to think about what others need. We’re not doubting ourselves, because the
question of whether we are good enough is no longer the central question. The central question now is about
what others need.
Thus, thinking about others instead of oneself helps solve feelings of self-consciousness and inadequacy,
which in turn makes you feel a lot less broken and alone when you’re struggling.
It’s one of life’s great paradoxes: When we serve others, we end up benefiting as much as, if not more than,
those we serve. So whenever you feel a bit lost and alone with your own issues, try to shift your focus from your
circumstances to the circumstances of those around you. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” ask, “How
can I help you?” Find someone who could use an extra hand and make a small, reasonable offer they can’t
refuse. The perspective you gain from doing so will guide you forward.
Closing Thoughts . . . on Being Alone
We’d like to end this discussion by directly addressing fellow souls out there who are tired and weary and
struggling to find happiness at this very moment, seemingly alone.
We know you’re reading this. And we want you to know we are writing this for you . Others will be confused.
They will think we are writing this for them. But we’re not.
This one’s for you .
We want you to know that we understand. Life is not always easy. Every day can be an unpredictable
challenge. Some days it can be difficult just to get out of bed in the morning, to face reality and put on that
smile. But we want you to know that your smile has kept both of us going on more days than we can count.
Never forget that even when times get tough, as they sometimes will, you are incredible—you really are.
So please try to smile more often. Even when times are hard, you have so many reasons to. Time and time
again, our reason is you.
You won’t always be perfect, and neither will we. Because nobody is perfect, and nobody deserves to be
perfect. Everybody has issues. Nobody has it easy. You will never know exactly what we’re going through, and
we will never know exactly what you’re going through. We are all fighting our own unique war.
But we are fighting through it simultaneously, together.
If someone discredits you and tells you that you can’t do something, keep in mind that they are speaking
from within the boundaries of their own limitations. In this crazy world that’s trying to make you the same as
everyone else, find the courage to keep being your awesome self. And when they laugh at you for being
different, go ahead and smile back at them with confidence.
Remember, our courage doesn’t always roar aloud. Sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day
whispering, “I will try again tomorrow.” So stand strong. Things turn out best for people who make the best out
of the way things turn out.