When You No Longer Need to Escape Yourself

Loneliness does not always begin when there is no one around. Sometimes a person lives among people, talks, laughs, gets messages, meets friends — and still feels a strange emptiness inside. Because the presence of others does not yet mean closeness, and the noise around us cannot always drown out the silence within. We can be deeply afraid of being alone not because we need another person so much, but because when we are alone with ourselves we hear all too clearly what we have long been running from.

Perhaps that is why we sometimes look for relationships not out of love at all. It seems to us that we need a person, but in fact we need someone to distract us from our own anxiety, to give us a sense of significance, to fill our free time, to convince us that we are needed and can be loved. The other person quietly becomes a medicine for our inner emptiness. And while the medicine works, we call it happiness. But gradually dependence sets in: it is no longer enough for the person simply to be there. They must constantly confirm that we matter. Respond the way we need. Give attention in just the right amount. Rescue us from a bad mood. And love begins to turn into one person’s duty to hold up another person’s inner world.

But no one is able to keep rescuing us from ourselves. We can receive an enormous amount of love and still feel its lack if there is a place inside us that we demand be filled from outside.

Mishlei says: “The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself” (11:25). These words hold a remarkable reversal of our usual logic. We think: first I must be filled, and then I will have something to give. First let me be loved — then I will be able to love. First let someone make me happy — then I will share happiness. But the soul, it turns out, can also move in the opposite direction: a person begins to give — and discovers in themselves what they had never noticed before.

Wholeness does not mean that we need no one. That would not be freedom but another form of loneliness. A human being needs a human being. We need love, friendship, touch, conversation, the sense that someone is waiting for us to come home. But there is a huge difference between “I need you because without you it is as if I don’t exist” and “I need you because beside you I want to share what is in me.”

In the first case we cling. In the second we open up.

Perhaps the soul begins to grow up when a person gradually stops seeing the other as the answer to all their inner questions. They learn to stay in silence without being frightened by it. They stop measuring their own worth by the amount of attention they get. They no longer take every evening alone as proof that something is wrong with them. They begin to know themselves without an audience.

And then a strange thing happens: the person who has learned to be alone becomes far more capable of real closeness. Because now they come to the other not empty-handed. They no longer need to keep taking proofs of love. They can listen, not just wait to be heard. They can give space without taking it as rejection. They can love without turning love into the fear of loss.

Perhaps inner wholeness is not a state in which you are enough for yourself. We will never be enough on our own. It is a state in which another person is no longer obliged to cover with themselves the emptiness we are afraid to face.

And then love changes its meaning. We no longer say to someone: “Fill my life, because without you it is empty.” We can say something entirely different: “My life is already here. And I want to share it with you.”

Perhaps it is at this very moment that the flight from loneliness ends and real closeness begins.

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