While I was away on my solitary holiday I felt (and wrote about) a certain unpleasant feeling. One could suppose it is a feeling of loneliness. I tried to write about it when I was there and had it most vividly in my memory. I will try to sum up the entire experience at a later point and drawing references to the original description of the experiment, but I wanted to isolate the description of this feeling, as I find it rather interesting and is the core of why I would not want to repeat the experiment in the same way.
It’s a strange feeling. Being alone in an unfamiliar environment. It’s something I’ve felt a number of times throughout my life. Going back to when I was a kid and going away for camp with school and things of that nature. It’s an unnerving feeling of anxiety that reminds me of the fragility of social contact, i.e. how easy it is to become completely desolate and alone. In this state I am actually scared that I might loose those who matter to me, and I become very sentimental about old friends and think very much of how I act toward them and they toward me.
Breaking off every single habit I have at once is, it turns out, a pain. Waking up in the morning I feel calm, sleeping restores my faith in my own capabilities. It restores my analytical thinking and makes me capable of analyzing the feeling. Trying to come to grips with it. When the dark comes back and the warming refreshing feeling of the sun is gone my reasoning turns into an active state of trying to remove the anxiety. Trying to think of ways to escape the loneliness rather than confronting the feeling and dealing with it. I am then like a drowning man flailing in the water.
As the days passed and I got some routine into the trip I found that the feeling mostly came to me while being in my room. This could very well be because there was nothing to do in the room, nothing to see, nothing new to experience, it was just a completely anonymous room. There was nothing to remind me that I was in a place I actually liked.
The feeling came very strongly with actions that reminded me of home and regular routine. The feeling would go away momentarily when using the computer but thinking about using the computer made in come even stronger. It was as if knowing what I was missing out on back home made it stronger, so not only was it a feeling of loneliness, it was a feeling of home-sickness.
Spending 500 words writing about a (I am sure) very common feeling is quite unlike me (I hope), but I really found it fascinating. And it’s a feeling I really don’t have that much, it’s not something I have ever experienced on previous travels with family and friends. No, this is something different, something fundamental in me, that I know have been there for very long. Something I wish to rid myself of, but doubtful about the possibilities of doing so.
