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Hello, good evening.
I am
pianycist, or metapianycist depending on where you know me
and this is in response to
Heidi's most recent Hot Pieces of Ace video
where she asked the question at the end of the video, "What is the difference
between being alone and being lonely?"
and this
is a topic of
personal relevance uh...
to me as a nonromantic person
because
the two are often conflated a lot
when...
It's a commonly said thing to nonromantic or aromantic people:
"Oh, you're alone; therefore
you must be lonely!"
and I...
have spent a lot of time thinking about what the what both words
mean
and, like, rather than responding to the
first part of
that, for this video i'm going to talk about
what that argument
means and why it's a bad argument
without having to verify whether or not i am actually alone
because of being nonromantic.
Okay, anyway.
There are lots of things that you can do
when you're alone and not be lonely
meaning...
What I mean is: you can be alone without being lonely
Say,
you're playing a video game, or you're reading a book,
or you're writing in a journal, or you're making some kind of art,
you're hiking, you're studying
you're doing something to occupy yourself.
And
I don't think that when i'm sitting by myself
reading a book
--well i am clearly alone if i am
in my room by myself and reading a book
but i'm not lonely,
and the same is true for
the other examples I listed.
If i am doing those things alone in my room
--well, not /enjoying nature/ alone in my room but like out in the woods by myself enjoying
nature--
and
it doesn't entail being lonely there's not really a connection between the two
although i might be lonely at the same time
but there's no necessary connection.
People tend to assume that the converse of that statement is also
true:
that if you're not alone
you can't be lonely.
And this is
relevant to
aromanticism again
because there was a submission
on Tumblr today to the blog
LGBT Gives Me Hope
and the submission
um...
in summary
was
uh... "I'm lonely now but
I know that there is
my husband slash wife
waiting for me, waiting for me to meet them, and I won't be lonely anymore once
I marry them."
But it's not true that
if you're not alone you can't be lonely
because there are situations where you can be lonely but not alone which most which
a lot of people seem to neglect.
For example
uh...
the times in my life where i felt loneliest
were when I was in
my long
string of
one toxic friendship after another.
Um...
For reasons that aren't really relevant to the video,
um
I've
i have had problems with emotional dependence
in the past
that just tended to be on people who didn't listen to me,
or weren't understanding toward me,
or were deliberately gaslighting toward me.
So
it can be said that when I was with them I wasn't alone
because I was with other people,
but I was very lonely because these were people who
didn't wanna listen to me and
didn't understand when I
tried to tell them something.
Um... The idea that
if you're not alone, you can't possibly be lonely is an idea that
might encourage people to stay in toxic situations like that
and that's not good.
Um...
So anyway:
the difference between being alone and being lonely.
I think that being alone by itself easy neutral quality
um...
potentially positive for people who enjoy being alone, like introverted people
like
--well, according to personality tests like the myers-briggs test I'm an introvert
and I like doing things by myself a lot like reading books and playing
games--
while loneliness
is
very clearly a negative quality
and I don't think either
implies the other.
I don't think loneliness implies being alone, and I don't think
being alone implies
feeling lonely.
And that is my answer to heidi's question on the difference between
being
alone and being lonely.
I hope you enjoyed this.