The First 24: The Loneliest (Mini-Series 2/5)

Regarding: November 9 - November 11th, 2016

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Loneliness

McCarthy in when the dust and adrenaline began to settle. In the moments of calm, I had time to feel how alone I was: I didn't really know anyone from my cohort -- we'd only been together for 3 or 4 days after all, and everyone I did know was half a world away.

I wrote this in my journal:

"I was thinking last night about feeling lonely, and I thought back to AmeriCorps. I kind of wish I'd brought my diary from AmeriCorps…when I think back to AmeriCorps, I remember... feeling so included and like that was my family. I don't remember feeling lonely... And it's hard to imagine Peace Corps, the group here, feeling like that group in AmeriCorps. I miss people from college, and Lizzie, and.. Mom and Dad, and I feel like Peace Corps won't ever really feel like my family.

But I wish I'd brought my diary from AmeriCorps, because I know in AmeriCorps I felt exactly the same way. During so many of my projects I felt completely alone, and I desperately missed people from home...

So, as hard as it is to believe now, I know this group of 34 people will start to feel like my family, but it's really hard to believe that right now. It's hard to believe I would look back on this time, just like I do in AmeriCorps, and want to be surrounded only by the people I'm currently surrounded with. But I just have to trust that that will happen and keep a positive attitude."

Loneliness was a common theme at McCarthy. I began to feel the effects of being separated from my friends and family by an ocean and 9 hours. Conversations my side of the Atlantic, certainly for the first few weeks, generally didn't extend beyond surface-level banalities. This was somewhat due to time constraints: We spent nearly 11 hours a day in sessions, and when we weren't in sessions, we had laundry and sleep competing for our attention; but, the truth is that genuine friendships just take time to develop.

4 months later, I do feel like the people in my cohort are my family; I would be happy being surrounded only by them. But getting to this point was a process, and the process involved substantial periods of feeling unequivocally lonely. And, though it first manifested itself at McCarthy, what began at McCarthy has become a 27-month-long exercise in feeling comfortable in my own skin, and in making myself the best company it can be.

Peace Corps has helped me develop "happy hermit" syndrome. Happy hermit syndrome is complete comfort in isolation. So much so, that you begin to crave it. It's basically one version of PC Stockholm syndrome: You're on your own so much that you begin to identify with your isolation and see its point of view -- "being on my own really is for the best!". Some symptoms include refusing out-of-site trips with other PCV's because you don't need their company (and the travel just sounds exhausting) and earning the nomer (ha) "Site Rat".

My time at McCarthy helped put me on the path to happy hermitude, possibly irrevocably so, and it also gave me time to begin to develop the support system on which I now rely.

This this isn't to say that after McCarthy I stopped experiencing loneliness. There are still days when I feel that no one understands me or what I'm going through. But this loneliness is not so different from what I think I might experience back in the States; it isn't this oppressive feeling that I've left everything for nothing.

Now I have a Peace Corps family that I can't imagine leaving; when they can't do the trick (as occasionally happens in even the best of families), I have a Peace Corps mansion to accommodate all the happy hermiting my heart could desire; and when that fails, I am reminded that those separated by an ocean and 9 hours are really just a phone call away.

The luckiest, eh?