Existential Loneliness hiking with Beauvoir Alessandra Angelini

Oct 26, 2021

I believe there is a part of each of us that only we can know. This part is not so deep as to be wholly invisible to others but not so shallow as to be clear. It requires us to baby it, quell, nurture, and quiet it. It’s a piece of us that we carry and that carries in return. I’ve learned to recognize this part in friends, close or otherwise acquainted. Some people show their secrets easier than others. Some have this aspect written all over their faces; others reveal it only to some or don’t show anyone. I find, usually, it’s their deepest desire. It’s the part of us that requires the most attention and, yet, must be reasonably ignored. It’s the thing they search for the most but cannot seem to find. It’s their sadness and their fuel. It’s what they compensate for. In thinking of mine, it’s an aspect of me that requires acknowledgment–the occasional gesture towards it, but also must be quieted before overwhelming me.

The recognition of this piece of me took time. It has probably been more apparent to others in my life for longer than it has been obvious to me. That’s how these things go. It’s always been there, quietly lurking, singing me to sleep, teasing me. It’s the thing that hurts me the most, yet through that hurt, heals. It’s my loneliness. And my chosen form of compensation, the way I quell and baby, is to choose to be alone often.

This part of me, this alone-prone part, has been the source of most of my pain and yet, so much of my comfort because I like to be alone. If I pay too much attention to my loneliness, I hurt. But if I ignore it, I’m blind. Blind to, what I’ve come to find out is the empowering reason I do it, not the socially awkward one. Only through recognition of this part of me have I begun to dance with it, to swing in-step with it. I’ve learned that my inherent need as a human being to be alone is not a crippling setback but instead is the forging of my path. It is the unrelenting pursuit of my life’s meaning.

The first time I traveled alone, I went to Vienna, Austria. I had been in Europe for a couple of months and craved a trip outside of France somewhere unique. I debated between Austria and Wales.

Vienna, Austria is a small and grey city, or at least when I was there. My two days were spent under umbrellas and shivering from museums to cafes. The streets were dim and quiet, with only the sounds of rain and the occasional pedestrian. Mostly silence echoed. I didn’t bring much with me but my camera, a few shirts, sweaters, and a pair of black trousers. By the end of the trip, they all smelled of mildew. Occasionally the rain would stop, tease me with drizzles, then outpour entirely.

I’ve become very comfortable in new cities. I find that they have many things in common, ways to ease the unfamiliarity. It takes practice to get used to following a map in unknown territory, staring down at your phone, hoping that the neighborhood becomes what you’d envisioned. I’ve learned to allow myself a certain comfort level in taking a right or left turn without knowing what’s down the road. Across from my hotel, there was a vast park. It was the usual European kind with beige, sandy-colored gravel, open grass fields, low-hanging trees, and carved archways with giant statues. Parks are a comfortable and reliable stop for any cities’ newcomer. Everyone seems to be alone in a park, so it’s an alone-together kind of place. People there hustled through to their next destination, took umbrella’d strolls, or sat on benches when the rain relented. In drier moments, grey-haired men would read newspapers, teenagers would group, and I would observe and wander.

In this grey and misty city, I was alone and liked it. But it’s uneasy traveling alone. Traveling alone means a new occurrence of inner-monologue. It means talking myself through airports, debating my hunger, deciding my next stop. Right or left, too early, too late. I lullaby myself to sleep. It’s not the solitude that stands out to me, though. It’s the feeling of independence. It’s a state of complete self-reliance. There’s nowhere to run from me. If I get tired, I have to sit on a bench and wait for the feeling to pass. If I get hungry, I have to pray a good spot pops up down the street.

A reliable route to self-information, being alone, and learning to enjoy it can be a path to unlearning loneliness altogether.

To learn to be alone, Simone de Beauvoir took up hiking. It became, intensely so, her path to self-information and self-liking. This was the pursuit of living her existentialist theory–through hiking alone as a means of rejecting self-pity, pursuing her path, and committing to her happiness. Existentialism is the belief that a human’s path is self-proclaimed and self-discovered and that it is every person’s ethical imperative to find and follow it, at whatever cost. By walking alone as a reliable way of being alone, Beauvoir claimed her loneliness–unshackled it and danced with it.

When I learned about Beauvoir and her hiking, I felt a kinship with her. I thought back to my trips alone, my lifetime’s worth of feeling by myself yet drifting always towards me-time. Perhaps being alone, for me, is existentially necessary. Perhaps it’s my ethical imperative to advocate for my joy, and after years of trying to deny it, I am potentially my best when I am with myself. This piece of me, the one that comes in a different form for each of us, is surely our greatest pain but also our guiding star. It’s not path-shaking or earth-shattering, but rather is path-preservation. It’s the reinforcement of what we need the most. It’s the unshackling and the dancing with our pain to unlearn it.

Written by Alessandra Angelini

Writer and founder of The Workshop Publishers. From the Water is my weekly newsletter. Here I write personal essays and opinion pieces. Based in Brooklyn, NY.