I’ve been on my own most of my life. Not everything I experienced alone, but I did travel by myself, went out to restaurants solo, visited extended family as a single member, attended concerts on my lonesome, I live in my own space, follow my own routines and pursue my own goals.

The things we go through together, great or small, good or bad, are elevated through their shared nature.
But what about the unshared moments?
Are those lesser parts of our lives?
Are there different types of solitude we can experience?

Certainly there are different ones and they do matter in their own way.

There is physical loneliness, which might be what first comes to mind. Being far from any other human body restricts and relieves our responsibility, but also our interactivity with our human network. It is a safe way to escape sensory phenomena and the human-like spontaneousness. Here’s where we recharge and reconnect with ourselves mostly. It is the kind that almost every person knows and can relate to. And most importantly, many are able to choose this kind of loneliness.

Less of a choice are conditions that single us out. Be it something we are born with, something that came or went within our life or just something we are experiencing differently. If we are (visibly or invisibly) outstanding in a given societal structure, our connections to the things people do or talk about are limited. The many efforts of accessibility and inclusion aim to fight this kind of loneliness with many weapons.
As a member of the autism community, I have felt this my whole life, but after the diagnosis, I also see more of it clearly and I am happy to have so many fruitful environments to connect and relate to.

There is also a kind of loneliness that is independent of human proximity. When you are amongst people, even if you interact with them and you are also part of their society, you can still be all alone, mentally.
When all the above doesn’t contribute to a sense of belonging and the struggles, thoughts and sensory input register so differently from the seemingly shared experience, one can be more alone than ever.
These moments are dark, but can serve as a turning point, so we seek more true connections to places, people and circles.
In those moments, if we are not connected to anything inside of us or if nobody is connected to our struggles, we can get lost easily. That makes educating and sharing our individual experiences so fundamental and a great place to start making things easier.

What we are connected to inside, independent of the ever-changing surrounding elements, still matters most and is a trustworthy fallback. Identity, self-worth, even the odd memory of a good experience can do the job.

And the best thing on the lonely road: It is okay to be lonely.

As soon as we understand why we are lonely at times and what it means to us personally (that it might not be a devastating situation to avoid) from loneliness will come solitude and from dread will come inner peace.

Without checking back on society, I would probably rarely have a sense of whether my own interests are normal or of a special nature.

And as the brain is in conscious learning mode from the start, it’s hardly worth focusing on what’s normal. After all, that’s but the average, and hardly anyone has truly lived up to their potential by being as normal, mediocre, and average as possible.
“That can’t be the goal,” has thus become etched into my subconscious, and my brain has done the rest.

I’ve always felt, in terms of what’s normal for me (though by checking back…less so), more drawn to extremes and fringe phenomena.
Be it music from niche genres, my home decor, the quirks of various dear friends, taste in movies, hobbies, thought patterns, life decisions, food choices at restaurants, or the choice of words in special moments.
How much better can one understand something if one knows not only its general centre but also all the bizarre outgrowths at its edges?

If I were to focus solely on that centre, I would miss out on the special kind of unity that arises when you meet like-minded people in such a niche. That is a very effective way to ease the loneliness that manifests as a way of life, and I don’t even mean that in a judgmental way!

A view from my perspective: The distance between societal norms and the median of my preferences is longer than the distance from one eccentricity to the next.
This means that neurodivergent people are more open to deviations from the norm than the public, because to them, these deviations are often even less odd than societal norm culture itself.

And with so much familiarity with whimsical and surprising things, it’s easy for me to see through seemingly extraordinary circumstances and reach their core directly.

As much as I, as an autistic person, value frameworks and norms, they are merely the boundaries for freely chosen content. And these take different forms from person to person and are filled with a wide variety of shapes and colours.

And where do I fit in?
I would rather be the reason someone comes into contact with something extraordinary than with something that is to be found everywhere.

What I don’t know won’t hurt me.
But the opposite is even worse. And, for a touch of absurdity: when I know that I don’t know something, it hurts me even more. That’s why curiosity has often been a touchy subject in my life, and when someone says, “Let’s have a chat later,” that’s the end of peace and routine.

But that’s not what this is about. It’s about the special relationship between my feelings and my knowledge.

I like to translate the word “Autistic” as “Hyper-Feeler.” Feeling so much that it hurts is what causes all the behaviours commonly referred to as “autistic.” That is, the systematic dissociation from sensory and emotional impulses, social deviations and nonconformism, and susceptibility to the psychological side effects. These are all technical measures and solutions against the overwhelming power of feelings. I am very grateful to have found more socially compatible solutions than crude ones in my life so far.

I can only experience a feeling without dread if I can classify and name it. At some point in life, you reach a point where you have enough knowledge to interpret the feelings that arise in most everyday situations. This has always been a great support pillar in my life: being able to express why I do what I do and, as a basis for this, what I feel.

And this basis is fed by knowledge. If I don’t know from the facts at hand that I am afraid or should be afraid, then I am not afraid. If I don’t know how to interpret my cocktail of feelings as hunger, then I won’t come to that conclusion so quickly. So, raw emotion and raw sensory stimuli always need cognitive translation. And beyond the basics of human life, there are many areas where more knowledge makes it possible to access specific feelings:

I learn how a car works and as a result feel exactly what I need to do with the clutch pedal. I learn how the internet works and as a result feel what is happening in the background every time I visit a website. I learn about the sensory world of horses and as a result feel completely different things than ever before when I see any steed. I learn about my organs and as a result feel very clearly how my circuits are functioning. I learn a new rule of language and as a result cannot act against it without terror. I learn about values at work and as a result feel them as if they were my own.

It gets particularly crazy when the knowledge relates to less obvious “facts,” namely other humans.
There are as many complex processes involved as there are within my very self, and on top of that, they are hardly ever tangible or predictable. When I gain a piece of knowledge about humans, I can better feel how other people feel and behave accordingly. It’s especially dim when a piece of knowledge originates from a third person, or might even be of negative content, and I as a result have to find my feelings from all these updated puzzle pieces.

I don’t want to be cautious and learn less out of fear of feeling too much.
I want to have so much useful knowledge that I can learn more and more about feelings, regulate them, and be happy so that I can make others happy too!

If a human is reading this: Please make it easy for me and tell me positive things about other people or give me clues on how to correctly interpret negative information. That could just make the next encounter with that person more pleasant.