We Are All In This Together, But Alone

And Why That Might Be the Whole Point

It was Easter Sunday. The sun was out, cooler than normal in middle Tennessee, wisps of clouds drifting across a sky that had no business being that beautiful, given everything happening in the world.

I was sitting on my deck alone.

Not because something was wrong between my husband and me. He was downstairs in the pottery studio, doing what he does when the restless energy gets to be too much. Moving his hands. Making something. And I was outside, doing what I do.

Basically, feeling everything.

The weight of the world had been sitting on my chest since morning. I’d seen something online that I couldn’t unsee, the kind of thing that makes you wonder if history is just a loop we keep playing on repeat, slightly remastered each time. I’d been processing collective grief, personal grief, and planetary energy that had been running hot all week. The world feels like it’s fracturing in real time. The quiet knowledge that nobody in my immediate life could hold all of what I was carrying.

Not because they’re bad people. Not because they don’t love me.

Because that’s just not how this works.

And sitting there in the sun, I let myself cry. Really cry. The kind that comes from somewhere deep, somewhere underneath the personal story, underneath even the collective story. The grief of knowing that no matter how long you’re with someone, no matter how much you love them or they love you, no matter how vulnerable you get or how hard you try, nobody is ever going to ever really know you.

Not your partner. Not your best friend. Not your parents. Not the person you’d trust with your life.

Nobody.

And for a few minutes, I let that be as devastating as it actually is.

A Beautiful Story

We are sold a story from the time we’re small. Find your person. Find your group. Find the place where you finally belong, and you’ll never feel alone again.

It’s a beautiful story. And it’s not entirely wrong. Connection is real. Love is real. The moments when someone sees a piece of you and reflects it back accurately, those are real, too, and they matter more than almost anything.

But the full version of you? The whole landscape? Every dimension, every contradiction, every layer of who you are in this incarnation?

Nobody gets that. Not even you, not fully, not yet. You’re still discovering yourself. I believe you’ll be discovering yourself until your last breath, and probably beyond that.

I used to think this was my particular burden. Something broken in me that made me too weird, too much, too deep, too complicated to be truly known. I’ve done enough healing work to recognize that story for what it is: old programming designed to keep me small and searching for external validation instead of doing the inner work.

But the truth is bigger, stranger, and actually more comforting than that once you let it land.

What if nobody is fully known? What if the aloneness isn’t the wound? What if it’s the whole point?

The Spiritual Case for Individuality

Here’s where I’m going to get a little woo, and I make no apologies for it.

Most spiritual traditions, whether you’re talking about ancient prophecies, channelings, downloads, or the mystical underpinnings of almost every major religion before they got organized, point to the same thing. We come from Source. Call it God, the Universe, Heaven, the Field, the Void, whatever word feels true to you. Whatever it’s called, it’s a place of total unity. Complete knowing. No separation. Pure consciousness experiencing itself as one.

And then we come here.

Into bodies. Into individuality. Into the beautiful, infuriating, heartbreaking experience of being a separate self with a separate perspective, carrying wounds and gifts we didn’t fully choose, navigating a world full of other separate selves doing the same thing.

What if that wasn’t a mistake or a punishment or a fall from grace?

What if we came here specifically to experience what it’s like to NOT be one? To feel the edges of ourselves? To know separation so we could understand, on a soul level, what connection actually means?

You can’t know what it’s like to come home if you’ve never left.

You can’t know the meaning of being seen if you’ve never experienced the ache of being unseen.

The loneliness isn’t something that happened to us. It might be something we chose, on a soul level, before we ever got here. The aloneness is the curriculum. The individuality is the point.

That doesn’t make it hurt less in the moment. But it changes the meaning of the hurt. It shifts it from something being wrong to something being exactly as it was designed to be."

What I Did With It

After I cried, I went inward.

I did a meditation. I worked with Ho’oponopono, the Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Directed inward first, then outward. To the parts of me still grieving the aloneness. To the relationships that can only hold fragments of me. To the world, doing what it’s doing right now.

And something came through in the stillness that I want to share with you, because it surprised me.

Love doesn’t discriminate.

I mean that literally and completely. Love is not reserved for the people who do good things. It is not withheld from the people, causing harm. It doesn’t pick the kind ones and reject the cruel ones.

Love is not a reward system. It exists in all of it.

It exists in the person building something beautiful and the person tearing something down. It exists in the protester and in the one they’re protesting against. It exists in the people I agree with and the people whose choices make my stomach turn. It exists in me, sitting there crying, and it exists in the people whose actions made me cry.

Love doesn’t require connection to be present. It doesn’t require understanding. It doesn’t even require agreement.

It just is. Neutral. Constant. Available to everyone, even the people we’d rather it skipped.

So I sent love out to everything. To everyone. To the planet still humming under all of it. To the sun, throwing off solar storms. To every living thing trying to navigate this strange, heavy, beautiful, sometimes brutal time.

Not because it fixes anything. Not because it’s a substitute for accountability or justice or real change.

But because it’s what I had to give. And because love sent outward always comes back through you first.

For the Ones Who Feel It All

If you’re reading this, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. The aloneness of carrying things nobody else in your immediate life can hold. The exhaustion of living in multiple dimensions at once, while the world operates mostly on one. The quiet grief of loving people who can only see and hold parts of you.

You’re not broken. You’re not too much. You’re not asking for the wrong things.

You’re just someone who goes deep in a world that mostly stays shallow. And that comes with a particular kind of loneliness that is real and valid and not something you can therapy your way out of completely, because it’s not a wound.

The work isn’t to stop feeling alone. The work is to stop making the aloneness mean something is wrong.

We are all in this together, every single one of us, navigating our own interior universe that no one else can fully enter. Separated by the very individuality that makes us who we are. Reaching toward each other anyway, across the space between, in the ways we can.

That reaching matters. The love we send out matters. The witnessing matters. The work we do in the invisible spaces matters.

Even when nobody sees it. Even when nobody can hold it all. Even when you’re doing it alone on a deck in the sun on Easter Sunday, while the world keeps spinning.

We are all in this together.

But we are each doing it alone.

And somehow, I think that’s exactly as it should be.