the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

Today’s question from Onsite is “What level of loneliness do you feel in your life? What levels of intimacy do you want? How do these compare?”

Most of the time I do not feel lonely – but I am human after all, so there are moments where I inevitably feel lonely. Sometimes when people think or feel differently the way I do without trying to understand me is when I feel lonely. A lot of my close friends (the few that I have) live far from me, and so sometimes not being able to hang out with friends easily is a lonely thing. I recently switched faith communities as well and so trying to re-integrate myself into another church has had its lonely moments as well, as we’re all not yet consistently doing life together as I would like or am used to in the past. Please note though, this is just a general loneliness, it is not something that makes me feel miserable all the time as I am still very relationally motivated at the end of the day, and am able to also find safe people with whom I can express these things with.

That being said, these are also the levels of intimacy that I would like – to be understood, to have a more consistent faith community, and to also have good friends nearby that I can spend time with. I am not where I would like to be in terms of the intimacy of this response, but I continue to learn to communicate better, continue to attend and interact with people in this new faith community, and am also a part of interest groups where I can hopefully find time to make new friends. It is sort of difficult in my life right now though to do all these things due to full-time work and graduate school.