Embracing loneliness/solitude...?

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Solitude re energizes me. It feel calm and content to be alone with my own thoughts and interests. But that's not to say I want to be alone all the time. I still want to communicate and be with the people I care about. It's not healthy to always be alone.

I never like feeling lonely but being by myself playing games, reading stories, and watching shows is pretty fulfilling I think. I feel loneliest when I'm around strangers. I have been without friends so long I couldn't imagine having one, so it doesn't really bother me.

Did you ever listen to the words of the song "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel? I would say that describes much of what you are saying and what people like ourselves have experienced.

I embrace my solitude. It's when I'm around others and they do not accept me that I start to feel lonely. I am an extremely introverted person so I enjoy my solitude. I know many aspies desire to be as social as NTs but they can't for various reasons.

If you have found your long-term special interest, then that could help with accepting isolation (although this comes from a person whose social nuclei fire more frequently when interacting with computers). As long as there is something to do, I can easily accept my status as being alone in a crowd, because I would think that some of my neurons from the information processing clusters got wired to those in my social nuclei, granting me some sense of social satisfaction when interacting with my computers.

I don't mind being alone. I grew up in a household full of siblings and then raised 4 of my own. I kind of like being alone but I miss the people I love. They all turned against me at once and I'm a little puzzled as to why, except that I guess I'm a pain to be around. It was a sudden betrayal, like what you describe. People went from hugging me and smiling, laughing at my jokes, to sudden hatred and ostracism. No one has told me anything specific, like I should just know.

My siblings aren't hard to live without but I've been a mother for 34 years. It's who I was. Now that my children won't communicate with me on any level, I've literally lost my identity. I knew I would have empty-nest issues, but this is ridiculous. It's been three years.

There's nothing I can do about it so I guess I just wait it out, or create a new life, or both. One day at a time. Get a dog, maybe. As long as you feed them, they'll be your friend no matter what you say.

I don't mind being alone so much but I'm a little worried about dying. I don't want my dogs to get too hungry before someone discovers my body.

Having read most of the posts on this topic, I feel that I can relate to most of what you people are saying as I felt similar when I was a teenager, which is what made me wonder if I may have had Asperger's Syndrome and I would tend to agree with the founder of this website that it is a condition, not an illness.

When I was younger, anyone who acted a bit oddly could be considered to be mentally ill so I wouldn't want to see people falling into the same trap nowadays.

I would like to describe my experiences as a teenager and would be interested to know if anyone has had a similar experience.

As a child in Scotland in the 1960s, I went through puberty at an early age and was considered to have grown up too quickly, having had a brief sexual encounter with a girl in the playground at the age of 8, which strangely enough I forgot about later and only remembered again about 10 years ago, having repressed the memory for over 35 years.

I was always clever at school, particularly at Maths., and music made a vivid impression on me from a very young age, but I was no good at football (or at any other sport) and was ostracised by the other boys at school because of that.

By the time I was 11 or 12 years old, I was about 6 feet tall and had very strong sexual feelings and a vivid imagination.

Through my older brother, I became interested in the way-out music that came out in the early 60s (e.g. early PInk Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and some American bands of the time), which fired my imagination.

At nights, when the other local boys in my street went out to play in a field across the road from where we lived, I would prefer to sit in my room in the dark with a coloured light on, listening to music such as the early Pink Floyd and feeling that I was in some sort of ecstasy as if I was floating through space (for anyone unfamiliar with their early music, it was, in my opinion, very imaginative, full of experimentation with electronic sound, a little bit similar to the soundtrack of a Sci-Fi film).

I was perfectly happy like this but, unfortunately, this, along with my fascination with astronomy at that time, led my mother to worry that something might be wrong with me which, along with my conflicts with my arrogant father, led to me being hospitalised for two and a half years.

This made me very angry as I felt that I was being taken away from my main interests and I became more and more depresssed the longer I was in hospital. When I tried to explain to the psychiatrist that I thought that, if someone was happy and not harming anyone else, they should be left alone, I wasn't listened to and I was told that I would be kept there longer if I kept saying that I thought that there was nothing wrong with me.

I later wrote at the age of 17 about my experiences in the hospital in my novel "The Madhouse of Love" (Chipmunkapublishing 2010), which I think some of you might be interested in reading, as all the memories of what happened kept flooding back into my mind and I felt that I had to write it all down.

Other ecstatic experiences which I went through at about the age of 12 included a strong feeling of love for my own body (I was very good-looking at the time and I would love to walk around naked in the room and look in the mirror - I also wanted women or girls of my own age to look at me and later went to naturist places for that reason when I was 16 after I had run away from home), looking up at a starry sky at night and taking long walks in the country and appreciating nature, particularly trees at night, for instance - and I would sometimes feel as if I was at one with the whole universe.

I felt, and still believe, that I was going through some profound spiritual experiences at the time and feel very strongly that I should have been left alone to continue my spiritual development - and, another point is that the fact that I was able to achieve such ecstasy and spiritual enlightenment without the use of drugs or alcohol, about which I knew next to nothing at the time, should have been encouraged.

I would be very interested to hear if anyone has gone through similar experiences.

Personally, I don't really like being alone, but that's probably since I only associate "being alone" with boredom. From there, I associate boredom with thinking too much about what happens (or more likely, what has happened) in my life, and playing negative scripts in my head about how no one likes me. But that's only because I am overly concerned about my reputation, even compared to many NT teens I know.

That being said, solitude can be a good thing sometimes, but nine times out of ten I just get sick of it rather than enjoying it.

I wouldn't be worrying too much about your reputation as everyone worries about that at your age.

When I was in my mid-teens, I had problems with my parents, I was being bullied all the time at college, I couldn't find a girl-friend and didn't have any real friends.

However, I think that my imagination saved me from being depressed all the time.

In my later teens, I had a nine-month relationship with a woman 10 years older than me (although she looked much younger) who loved me for what I was.

Although that didn't last, after that relationship broke up, I started travelling all over Europe on my own. I met girls who were interested in me, made many friends abroad and I also found that by travelling alone I was able to do what I wanted and go where I wanted when I wanted.

I really think looking back on it now that I had many great experiences that most people would have missed out on, so it can be that something good can come out of being alone in the end.

Instead of gloating all the time over the present and the past, it might be a good idea if you could think about something that in your heart you would really like to do and then you might find that it will be possible some time, if not now at some time in the future.

How you feel is a choice. You can choose to dwell on happy things. If you find yourself slipping, you find ways to remind yourself. Why do you think people put pictures and all that toy crap around their desks? Why do you think comedies are so popular?

When you're alone, you are king of the World. The space around you is your own. No one to comment of how you're doing it wrong. No one to need your attention. Alone is freedom. I get so much done when I'm alone. Housework, writing, gardening, research.

For me, most of my family and friends are just pit stops. I only regularly and really converse with a few. I like it this way. What I have trouble with is how a few people won't allow me to exist in their lives at all. That hurts. It's the only thing left that makes me cry. It's a choice, or maybe not. How do you stop loving your child? I don't think I can.

I love my friends and enjoy every moment I have with them, but I don't mind being alone. Being alone has just become part of my "normal." On the rare occasion that I'm not swamped with homework or at sports practice, I am usually alone on the computer. I do hang out with my friends on occasion but they don't call usually more than once or twice a month. Most of my social life is in school only.

I have never been very trusting of other people so I spend most of my time isolating myself from them.