Most days, I am convinced that there are few lonelier places than my mind.

To be clear, I don’t mind it here. Age and the thin veil of maturity have quite accustomed me to it. I am excellent at entertaining myself, and so I will proactively deny your kind offer to take me to the circus. I have everything I need up here — clowns who can juggle, elephants, tales of deep suffering for when I feel especially solemn.

As such, my loneliness is not silent. It is populated with the voices of friends, curling and twisting threads of memory that take me from Bangkok to Berlin in the course of seconds. It is a multi-coloured maelstrom, a polychromatic commotion; it is boundless and yet it is limited, because as profoundly as I wish to, I cannot share it with anyone else.

I’ve spent many hours of my life wondering whether other people think like I do. I have never particularly wanted to be a mind-reader, nor wanted to have my mind read, but this dull curiosity has always lurked in the background of my thinking being. What do other people think about when they’re brushing their teeth? When they’re listening to music over a plate of unaccompanied eggs? Do they watch an infinitely repeating loop of memories like I do? That day on the train, in fifth grade; the fake proposal, the party the next day. I’ll never forget that train ride. 

Do they feel their stomach tighten as they replay the same conversations with friends over and over again? Do they ever worry that they are forgettable in the eyes of the world, and then that their constant concerns about the feelings of others are unreciprocated? Can some of them really care about the Cleveland Browns as much as I care about my dog?

Or can a mind be silent? Are people just wanderers strolling through a rainforest of memories, choosing to inspect individual leaves at will, each one variegated with past experiences that flow through its network of veins? 

We may only have public lives — a typecast list of our hometown, our education, accomplishments and dreams — but in these moments of solitude, we live a million other secret lives. These are intensely private morning rituals, vivid daydreams, journeys only to the center of the mind and although they are lived only hypothetically, they can reveal our most tender hopes, our frailest desires. 

At their most profound, conversations with friends promise glimpses into the secret lives of others — that which we yearn to know so desperately. In those vulnerable moments, we reveal what tortures and mesmerizes us when we are alone, the things that keep us up at night. And when my friends, my parents, even strangers relate to my clandestine tales, to the emotions and insecurities underlying my each waking thought, I am awash with joy at being surrounded by people who ‘get’ me. But these are mere glimpses, shimmering reflections that dissipate as quickly as they appear. They cannot fully know what I think about when I am alone. I cannot see into the eye of their maelstrom, nor gaze at the perimeter of their rainforest.  

Such a cynical worldview perhaps implies a staunch individualism that I, in good faith, cannot endorse. And so, the task falls upon me to find the solution. My dedicated readers will be unsurprised to hear that the only possible solutions are great friendship and great literature. 

It is in the emotionally truthful, painfully self-critical meditations of our favorite fictional characters that I have found a semblance of psychological truth, a truth that resembles that which we access through our most significant relationships. Some may call this writing psychological realism; I would posit that the term has lost its value. For what I mean is not the glamorized pathologies of Raskolnikov, the neuroses of Julian Sorel, but an emotional truth that is far more mundane. A truth that is akin to David Foster Wallace’s depiction of the mind of a depressed woman — of the self-deprecation that asking for help from loved ones invokes and breeds — or of Connell’s self-conscious rejection of hookup culture in “Normal People.”

When characters are most proximate to their pain, time slows down and the thin veil between fiction and reality dissolves. And as we gain a glimpse into their secret lives for the first time, we feel our collective human loneliness dissipate, if only for a moment. It is in these moments of transcendence that we gain the courage to truly relate to the people around us. For what does it mean to relate to a person, but to open the boundary that surrounds our mind and let in a friend — either fictional or real — for the first time. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a junior in Benjamin Franklin college. His column, ‘Growing Pains’, runs every other Tuesday.

 

PRADZ SAPRE
Pradz Sapre is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu