alone or lonely

carl jung said something i keep coming back to.
no matter how lonely you are, no matter how isolated you feel,
if you do your work truly and conscientiously,
unknown friends will come and seek you.

i believe that. i also think it leaves something out.

work is the one constant in a person’s life.
and i don’t just mean a job. i mean the thing you’re building,
the thing you’d do at 2am whether or not anyone paid you.
in the end you have nothing but that to show the world and to share with it.
your work becomes your story. it becomes your life.
and that is how it should be. that might be the best way to live.
or it’s the best way to not live. i genuinely don’t know which.

but here is the thing nobody tells you about doing the work.
it makes you alone.
not lonely. alone. those are two different things
and it took me a long time to learn the difference.

alone is a fact. it’s the empty room, the hours nobody shares,
the part of the road only you are walking.
lonely is what happens when being alone starts to hurt,
when you look up from the work and realise
you can’t remember the last time someone asked how you were
and actually waited for the answer.

the work gives you the first one for free.
the second one is a choice, and mostly it’s yours.

because as the work takes on its edge, people fall behind.
old friends. sometimes family.
not because they’re bad, but because they can’t see what you’re inside of.
they don’t get what you’re doing or what it’s costing you.
and there is a lie that feels true in that moment,
which is that it would be easier to let them go.
to stop explaining. to leave them, quietly, for your own sake.

i don’t think that’s allowed.
if we’re willing to work this hard for our daily lives,
how are we not willing to work on the people in them.
the relationship is also work. it’s also effort you accept.
we just don’t call it that, because it doesn’t come with a result you can show.

but you have to accept both ends. the working and the leaving.
because the truth underneath all of it
is that you can’t make anyone stay.
not with effort, not with love, not by being worth it.
if they stay, they stay. if it does, it does.
there is no version of trying hard enough that guarantees the room stays full.

so you learn to be patient.
patient for a second. a lifelong second.
you sit with your own company first, before you ask anyone else to sit with it,
and you find out whether being alone is going to turn into being lonely
or whether you can just be alone, and let that be fine.

jung was right. the unknown friends do come.
but only if you can survive the stretch of road before they get there
without setting fire to everyone still standing next to you.