Stop Romanticizing Loneliness

'If there is anything that can be crueler than death, it's nurturing false hope in your heart just to see them crushing every piece of you at the end.'

 You must have watched those YouTube videos or maybe read books that encourage you to romanticize your life, haven’t you? 

Well, I have. To be honest, only by watching those videos do I fall back into my imaginary world where I am the queen of the world (at least of my world). Just after imagining how it would feel to romanticize my life, I used to feel a different kind of excitement running through my veins, something that I cannot explain in words.

You might be thinking, ‘Renuka, if you love the concept of romanticizing life, then why are you telling me to not believe in it?’ 

Well, after experimenting, learning, watching, and reading about romanticizing life, I came up with this one explanation: Everyone is already romanticizing their life. They just don’t know the nature of their character yet.

 Confusing?

 Let me tell you how you are already walking down this path and why this can be the most dangerous thing for your future.

 But let’s first understand what romanticizing life means.

 Romanticizing your life means becoming the main character of your life as if your entire day is being recorded. In short, you act like you are in a movie playing the role of the main character. 

But here is the thing! 

Consciously or unconsciously, we all act like our favourite movie characters anyway.

 In any typical movie, the story starts with a girl and a boy. The girl is broken and finds herself in a dark (metaphorical) tunnel, with depression, stress, and anxiety (not to mention poverty and misfortune). Then? 

Then the boy comes into her life as the hero who saves her from this cruel world, gives her hope, teaches her how to love, and finally falls in love with her. And after that, both of them face this world together as if God was conspiring from heaven for their paths to collide. 

Sounds familiar?

 If not the girl, then the boy is broken and the girl comes as the goddess to play the same role that we have just read. And if there is no love story then there is a friendship story that revolves around the same thing. A broken, depressed, and pathless person meets with another person and they become best friends for life. 

Most of the movies/web series/books revolve around the same plot where one is broken and the other one comes as the guiding angel – which I like to call good drama. 

Now, the problem is that people like you and me have been watching/listening/reading about these kinds of life incidents since childhood so much that subconsciously we have become convinced that one day someone will come to save us, rescue us, or rather fall in love with us.

All my college life, I was waiting for a friendship like that of Joey and Chandler (from F.R.I.E.N.D.S), but nothing like that ever happened. I never had a best friend either in school or in college but I always wanted one – the kind of best friend we see in web series and movies. Perhaps, that is the reason that even after having a bunch of friends around me, I used to feel incomplete. 

But if I look back in time and see the world from a fresh perspective (or mature perspective), I can see a little girl wishing to have the same teddy bear she saw in some random movie.

 So, what’s wrong with this anyway?

 Well, your imagination shapes your reality, and here you are, sitting there, thinking how broke you can be and then how a perfect angel-like person will come to save you. The problem with this is that you choose to believe that you are not enough to change your life all by yourself. You rely on someone who doesn’t exist. And that’s why, when things don’t happen as per your imagination, you start feeling even more lonely – as if you had something but you lost it. 

If you have created an imaginary friend in your mind who you think will turn into reality, I would say, don’t betray yourself. No one is coming to save you or make you laugh or travel with you around the world as it happens in the movies. Life is not a movie. Move on from your hopes or get ready to see them crushed.

 Believing that someday you will meet perfect friends who will become a part of your soul is more like creating a graveyard of your hopes. The more you focus on meeting new friends, the more it will hurt. You will feel even more lonely thinking that you could have something but you didn’t. You will have to mourn the loss of someone you never had in the first place. 

I am not saying that you wouldn’t meet new people or you wouldn’t be able to make new friends at all. I made some good friends after college through Instagram. But one harsh truth about that is you cannot find your soul friends with desperate energy. You are not 16 anymore. People can see right through you. You have to first come home to yourself, feel comfortable with your own company and become interesting for yourself so that you are not waiting or putting yourself on hold for others to adopt you. If you start imagining every person who is nice to you as your future buddy because you are so desperate to make friends, then you are practically digging a graveyard of your hope. And let me tell you one thing from experience: If there is anything that can be crueller than death, it’s nurturing false hope in your heart just to see it crushing every piece of you at the end.

 Instead of imagining yourself as the character who needs someone in the first place, imagine yourself as the main character of the movie that is your life.