The water hitting the fireplace vent sounded wrong.
Not dangerous. Not threatening. Just wrong. Unfamiliar in a way that made my nervous system light up like someone had flipped every switch at once.
It was rain. Just rain. But I wasn’t used to that particular sound in that particular house, and my body treated it like a threat. Heart rate up. Breathing shallow. That animal awareness that something in the environment had changed and I needed to be ready.
Ready for what? Nothing. There was nothing to be READY for.
Just me, alone in a house I’d moved to after my divorce, listening to water hit metal and feeling my body prepare for danger that wasn’t coming. A yoga therapist with a nervous system that couldn’t tell the difference between rain and catastrophe. The irony wasn’t lost on me. 🙃
That’s what loneliness felt like. Everything felt like a threat.
That’s also what happens when aliveness dies. When you’re so disconnected from yourself that your nervous system can’t tell the difference between rain and catastrophe. When presence becomes impossible because you’re too busy bracing for the next thing.
The Poverty of Self
By day, I’m a researcher. And then on the side I double as a yoga therapist. I love it :)
I teach people how to come home to their bodies, how to listen to what their nervous system is trying to tell them, how to build practices that anchor them when everything else is chaos.
And for six months after the divorce, I couldn’t do any of it for myself.
My morning sadhana practice had grounded me for years. After the divorce, it just stopped. I’d wake up and the thought of getting on my mat felt impossible. Not hard. Not challenging. Impossible.
I lost my voice during those last four years of marriage. Not my total voice. I could speak just fine at work, articulate exactly what needed to happen professionally.
But in my personal life? I couldn’t say what I needed. Couldn’t ask for what I wanted. Couldn’t name the truth that was tightening my shoulders and cracking my teeth.
I can trace it back to small moments. The first time I swallowed “I need to talk about having kids” and said “we can discuss it later” instead. The way that avoidance became a pattern. How over four years, every postponed conversation taught my body that my voice didn’t matter in the one place it should have mattered most.
It was a weird problem to have.
The split made it harder to solve. If I’d lost my voice everywhere, that would have been clear. But losing it only in the place where it mattered most?
May Sarton wrote:
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
That poverty. The poverty of self. That’s what I’d been living in.
I had given something away. Slowly. Over years. Until there wasn’t enough of me left to know what I’d lost.
I’d lost aliveness. Not happiness or contentment or even peace. Something more fundamental: the capacity to be present to my own experience without managing it, performing it, or fleeing from it.
The Macrame Planter
I saw it at World Market while I was trying to add a bit more personality to the new place.
A macrame plant hanger. Beautiful, intricate weaving. Someone had cut the bottom off one of them. It was still on the shelf, marked down. An empty pot hanging precariously at the end of all that careful knotwork. Hanging almost like a joke.
I stood there holding it and understood, in that moment, precisely what had happened to me.
I was still living, still functioning, and doing the things a person does, like buying housewares, making dinner, going to work.
But I wasn’t connected to anything. All that structure—the routines, the responsibilities, the daily motions—leading to an empty vessel that couldn’t hold what it was meant to hold.
The macrame was still beautiful. The knotwork was gorg. But without that solid base, it couldn’t do what it was designed for. It could only hang there precariously, ornamental. Useless for its actual purpose.
I put it back on the shelf and left.
When Loneliness Hits
Dusk was the worst.
That liminal time when the day transitions into evening. When you’d normally be moving from work mode into home mode, from professional to personal, from alone to together.
Except there was no together anymore. Just more alone. Different lighting, same isolation.
I’d start making dinner for myself and the loneliness would hit like a physical thing. Not sadness. Not grief. Something colder. More numb.
The first time it really struck, I left. I just walked out of the house mid-cooking and drove. Nowhere specific, just away.
Flight response. My body was treating loneliness like something I could escape if I just moved fast enough.
The Stupid Decision?
Moving to the countryside after the divorce felt both necessary and sometimes profoundly stupid.
Necessary because the city held too many ghosts. Too many restaurants we’d been to, streets we’d walked, routines we’d shared. I needed distance.
Stupid because I knew practically no one there. I’d left everything familiar for... what? More isolation? Beautiful scenery for my loneliness?
Everyone in that small town had their lives. Their routines. Their people. And here I was, the stranger who’d fled his marriage and rented a house in a place he’d only visited a handful of times.
Loneliness in the countryside is different than loneliness in the city. In the city, you’re surrounded by people, which makes the isolation feel more acute (and distractible). In the countryside, the isolation is just... factual. Geography confirming what you already feel.
Cold. Loneliness was cold.
The Anchors
At some point, and I don’t remember exactly when, I started practicing again.
Not because I felt better. And certainly not because I’d had some breakthrough or reached some milestone in my healing process.
I started practicing because I was drowning and I needed something to hold onto.
Yoga. Journaling. Coffee in the morning with actual presence instead of just caffeine and checking my phone.
These weren’t comfort practices. They were emergency measures. Anchors dropped into a chaotic ocean to keep the boat from drifting into nothing.
They were practices of aliveness. Small, daily acts of showing up that kept me tethered to presence when everything in me wanted to disappear.
Some mornings I didn’t want to do them. Most mornings, actually. The discipline felt like violence. Forcing myself onto the mat when my body just wanted to stay small and protected under the covers. Demanding presence when absence felt safer.
But then: modification. Less time. Easier versions. Permission to do it badly as long as I did it. The violence softened into something closer to negotiation. My body and I, finding terms we could both live with.
The practices weren’t making me feel good. They were keeping me tethered to something… to myself, maybe, though at the time it didn’t feel like much of a self to tether to.
The Shift
I remember the first time I felt it.
Morning coffee. Part of my routine by then. Repetition had turned it into one without my deciding anything.
I was sitting there with my cup, actually there instead of scrolling or planning or anywhere else in my head. Just: coffee. Morning light. The particular quality of quiet that comes before the day really starts.
And I felt spacious.
Not happy. Not healed. Just: open. Present. Warm.
Not the cold shrinking of loneliness. Something else. Something that felt like my body had stopped treating existence as a threat.
Paul Tillich wrote that language created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone, and the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
Solitude. That’s what this was. Not the pain. The glory.
What Staying Looks Like
The waters didn’t calm. I learned to steady the boat.
The practices hadn’t fixed anything external. The loneliness still visited. The isolation was still factual. I was still alone in a house in the countryside where I knew almost no one.
But somewhere in the repetition (showing up on the mat, pen on paper, coffee in hand) I’d rebuilt something. Not the self I’d lost. That one was gone.
Something new. Something that could hold itself.
I started writing again. Laughing, actually laughing, not the performance kind. Thinking without needing to immediately distract myself from the thoughts. Making coffee and tasting it.
One afternoon, a neighbor stopped by to borrow a tool. We stood in my driveway talking for twenty minutes about nothing important. Afterward, I realized I’d been fully present for the entire conversation. Not performing. Not managing. Just there.
Small things. Daily things. That richness of self Sarton wrote about, practiced into existence through repeated acts of staying.
What It Felt Like in the Body
Loneliness had made me contract. Shoulders tight, chest closed, breath shallow. My whole system scanning for threats that weren’t coming.
Solitude let me expand. Spaciousness in my chest. Room to breathe. My body recognizing the moment instead of bracing against it.
I learned to offer myself things: comfort, grace, understanding. Not perfectly. Not always. But I learned the felt sense of the difference.
Loneliness shrinks. Solitude opens.
Loneliness still showed up, of course. But when it did, I’d learned to remember: I am my own strongest connection.
And I could sit with myself. Not because I’d transcended loneliness, but because I’d learned something. Slowly, through months of practice that felt more like survival than self-care. That I could be trusted to stay.
The Question Underneath
Being alone isn’t one thing. It can feel like relief or ache, freedom or exile.
But underneath all its moods, aloneness asks a single question: Can I stay with myself?
Can I be alive in my own presence? Can I be here, fully, without needing to perform or manage or flee?
Maybe you know this question. Maybe you’ve asked it in a different marriage, a different house, a different season of coming apart. The specifics shift, but the question remains.
For those first months after the divorce, the answer was no. I couldn’t. My body fled from loneliness like it was a physical threat. I left houses mid-cooking, drove nowhere just to be moving, filled every silence with distraction.
The practices didn’t make me suddenly able to stay. They just made it incrementally more possible. One morning at a time. One breath at a time. One cup of coffee drunk with actual presence instead of escape.
Until one day, the answer shifted. Not to “yes, always” or “yes, easily.” Just: yes. Sometimes. More often than before.
I learned to stay with myself. Even when it was hard. Even when loneliness visited. Even in the dusk hours that used to send me fleeing.
Not because I was healed. Just because I stayed.
I’d become something different than that damaged macrame planter represented. Not a vessel waiting for someone else to hold me. The body itself had become the vessel, rebuilt through practice. Structure and center, woven together.
Not structure leading to emptiness. Just: present. Alone in the way that holds richness instead of poverty.
I’d rebuilt aliveness. Not as an idea. As a lived capacity. The ability to be here, with myself, without outsourcing my presence to someone else or to some future version of healing.
The water still hits the fireplace vent in this new rental when it rains. But my body doesn’t treat it like a threat anymore.
It’s just sound. Just rain. Just me, staying with myself in the particular quiet that comes with choosing solitude instead of enduring loneliness.
Not every day.
Not perfectly.
But enough.
This might matter to someone you know who’s learning the difference between loneliness and solitude. Someone who’s wondering if they can trust themselves to stay.
Would you share it with them?
About Alex
I’m Alex Lovell — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and writer.
Lived homeless. Been divorced. Survived a seven-car pileup with a semi. Fell in love with questions that don’t have easy answers. I’ve met a lot of thresholds. Even the one before death.
These days, I split my time between research, writing, and holding space for people figuring out who they are after everything shifted.
This Substack is where I make sense of things out loud.
I write for people in transition — between roles, beliefs, relationships, selves.
The ones quietly wondering, “What now?” but allergic to one-size-fits-all answers.
Sometimes I quote research. Sometimes I quote my own nervous system.
One speaks in data, the other in sensation. I’ve stopped choosing sides.
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I can so relate to this. The time I was in crisis about a year ago, everything I did that felt good and healthy and grounding- yoga, hiking in the woods, going for walks with my dogs, just felt impossible. Until over time, sitting with my grief, at some point it became less impossible.
(And technically, I’m having coffee and on my phone right now, but when it’s to read things like this and be reminded I’m not alone in these experiences, it feels like it doesn’t count as “being on my phone”. )😊
The magic in these posts (this one in particular) is the deep universality of the human condition expressed so vividly in an individual's experience. Pain is pain. We've all felt it. But to give it voice in such a thoughtful, visceral way, gives others (such as Laura; hi Laura) the possibility to make sense of their aloneness, while they too transmute it into aliveness. You are Kindness. Keep doing what you do. We are all the better for it.