This morning I felt a little tug at my heart. A craving and nostalgia for the music of the 70s when I was a young wife and mother, tending to mothering, housework, and projects that often went unfinished. Alexa responded with just what I asked for. The Carpenters, Bread, Barry Manilow, Seals and Crofts. And then: Gilbert O’Sullivan. At 74, 50 years since his song landed in my soul, I found myself tearful, throat clogged, and with my hand anchored on my heart. Sitting with myself and my breath.
Not because I was sad or anything like that, but because the story and the melody had hit their mark as would the arrow of an archer. Off guard and vulnerable, present with the lyrics to their conclusion, lingering in my mind.
There’s a loneliness that doesn’t announce itself with tears or crisis. It descends quietly. I could be sitting in an airport, surrounded by movement, loudspeakers, rolling luggage, and voices, and feel its weight as it plunks itself beside me. It’s not panic. Not despair. Or grief. Just this deep, unmistakable, familiar sense of being alone in the dark, inside myself.
For someone on the spectrum, this loneliness carries a particular gravity. Long before there were words for it, there was the feeling of standing apart from the flow of things—watching, listening, sensing more than participating. Observing life unfolding for others, people connecting, while meaning seems to arrive effortlessly. And you remain just off-beat, clumsey, literal, and quirky as the rest of the world is singing in perfect harmony.
The song goes darker than I remember. It doesn’t rush toward consolation. It doesn’t insist on hope. It names what happens when you stop trying to outrun the weight of things. When the effort to stay in the light becomes more exhausting than the darkness itself.
I can recall the point where I stopped questing for the light. Not because I’d given up, but because the struggle itself was lije wrestling with the current. I allowed myself to unmoor and drift Into the dark. The quiet. The place where nothing needed to be explained, clarified, or corrected.
That darkness morphed into my own truth.. It peeled back the mask and released the pressure to act resilient, to create meaning on demand, to reassure anyone—myself included—that everything was fine. In the dark, I didn’t have to translate myself. I could simply be as I am. Sometimes alone and lonely.
To be clear, this is a brand of loneliness that does not spring from feelings of being unloved, unwanted, not enough. Rather, as I discovered, this is the loneliness of being singular. Of knowing that no matter how much fellowship and friendship I’ve known, there are passages that have been mine alone. Only now, at 74, I’m ok with that.
These dark passages are not the result of doing something wrong or failing. It’s familiar terrain—the one I’ve crossed often enough to know it’s not going to destroy me. Drifting, I am learning, is not an act of disappearing or isolation, but the means through which my soul can find healing and rest.
So when I hear the final stanza, Alone again, naturally, I am connected, not resigned. This is how it is. The dark comes. You stop resisting. You float. And in that surrender—not dramatic, not redemptive—I remain quietly, stubbornly alive.
Alone again. Naturally.
And still here.
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