lonely?

lone⋅ly
   /ˈloʊnli/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [lohn-lee] Show IPA
–adjective, -li⋅er, -li⋅est.
1. affected with, characterized by, or causing a depressing feeling of being alone; lonesome.
2. destitute of sympathetic or friendly companionship, intercourse, support, etc.: a lonely exile.
3. lone; solitary; without company; companionless.
4. remote from places of human habitation; desolate; unfrequented; bleak: a lonely road.
5. standing apart; isolated: a lonely tower.

Yet again, a seemlessly basic daily event has gotten me thinking. A lot of us quite often say that we are “lonely” but do we actually use that word in the context it was intended for? Are we really truely “alone” at any point in time?

I myself have often said “I was really lonely today”, but I find now that I am questioning the very concept of being “Alone”
Is it not safe to say that we declare ourselves as being “lonely” simply because we are bored with our own company? Because we are just fed up with the constant thoughts buzzing in our own heads?

I wonder. How many people can say that they are 100% without ANY interaction, that they have NO outside contact and have nobody at all? Everyone has someone. Be it a family member, a next-door neighbour or the local shop owner.
Can we be lonely in a room full of people? Can we feel alone, even in the midst of those we love? Not according to the official dictionary definition we can’t. So why do we find ourselves throwing the word around casually, when we’ve had a single day of being by ourselves.

To me, feeling truely lonely is symbolised by two things: being completely and utterly without any form of contact with the outside world, ie. no telephones, no tv, no computer, no sort of device which enables us to “see” or “speak” to another human being.
The second thing is emptiness. I’m not talking about a completely empty room, or an open space, I’m talking of mind-numbing emptiness. Dreams filled with nothing but darkness, a day wasted, without a single thread of thought. That, to me signifies lonliness.
I do not believe that we can ever truely be lonely, even if we were left with nothing but our own minds, we can still find some form of interaction.

Children, for example have “imaginary” friends. The psyche’s answer to a child’s feelings of abandonment, the mind’s response to feeling “alone”. It is logical to assume that adults would also produce the same response if put under similar, but slightly more extreme circumstances. In the minds of a scitzophrenic, for example. Have they created this “extra” image of themselves to combat the empty dreams and thoughtless expanses of time, or are they just psychologically unstable?

Who knows? The unconcious mind is capable of FAR greater things than we can ever percieve in our life times and it will never be quantified. Saying that, how can we know what true lonliness is? Is is safe to assume that just because we feel saddened by the lack of conversation, we are “lonely”? Can we really say that we are “alone” if we do not have a conversation at least once a day? If so then it would be possible to be lonely, even in the prescence of hundreds of people.

Is it just a sympathy ploy? I wonder how many of us have used the term “I’m lonely” to entice somebody to spend time with us? I know that is something I have fallen fowl on several times before and I am aware that I am likely to do it again in the future.
If however, we are ever really lonely, nobody would be there to hear our pleas, thus nobody would be physically able to come to our rescue….

Or maybe I just think too much and have too much “spare” time to amuse myself with such thoughts, so I leave you with one parting message.

Take a good look at what you have around you. Photos on the walls, Books and other materialistic items cluttering the shelves. Maybe even the family pet, purring contently on a soft, plush rug by the fire.
Now imagine it, all gone, a white room, empty walls, all those thoughts which reside in your head, gone, in a millisecond without you even realising they were there. Can you picture it in your head?
I doubt it.

Next time we feel “lonely” we should think about how “alone” we would feel if everything was suddenly taken away from us, our memories wiped so that a hollow shell was all which remained. I think that only when we feel like that can we really be “alone”.

 

A reflection

Lately I’ve been thinking about why we are the way we are. Are we made this way or do we learn from our environment and adapt ourselves to how we think people wish us to be?
Nature vs Nurture, but on a much larger scale. Do we, even as children adapt ourselves to how our parents behave or is it just “the way of the child”?

I mention this because today, while watching my daughter go about her buisness in true 17 month old fashion, wearing her pj top and a nappy, she did something which she has never been taught to do.

I gave her her usual breakfast of cheerios with a cup of juice. She immediately went to her flower rug, sat down and started to very nicely eat her cereal. She then carefully stood, walked over to me, handed me her bowl and said a very clear “Ta” before trotting off to play with her toys.
This came as quite a shock to me as I have not taught her to hand over her bowl once she is finished, nor have I taught her to say thank you after her meal.
She then shocked me even further during our trip to the shops. I got some snack’a’jacks for her as a treat and she wanted to hold the packet. Not wanting to be a spoil sport, I gave her the packet while I finished the rest of the shopping.
Once we reached the queue for the checkout, I tried to take the packet off her but she refused to hand it over.

I thought she was going to throw a tantrum as we were starting to get closer to the checkout. Imagine my suprise when it was our turn to pay for our goods and she quite calmly reached out of the buggy and handed the checkout superviser the packet of snack’a’jacks and said “ta” yet again.

This got me thinking. Is this something that she just “did” or is it something which she has picked up from us parents? Are there some things which we automatically learn, as if on auto pilot? Or is it more a case of monkey see-monkey do?
One would hope it would be the former, as if that were the case then our children would grow up to be polite, mild-mannered individuals with their own limits and boundries.
However, looking at todays “youths”, I highly doubt that it is anymore than the latter. A bit ironic for me to be saying this as I myself fall into the “youth” catagory at a very young 20 years old.

I find myself sitting here feeling as though I have been transported through time and getting stuck in this younger person’s mind. Of course that is physically and logically impossible, but why is it that I am so different to so many other people my age that it makes me ponder these things? I went to the same schools as those “youths”. I attended all the same lessons, was taught the same english and lived in the same street as many of them. Is it really all down to parenting techniques and the way we are dragged up by our parents to respect ourselves (and hopefully others).

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage. If I am to believe that all people are just the way they are and that it’s a generation thing, then I will always be in that small minority who don’t drink and smoke. The same minority who don’t go out clubbing everynight, preferring instead, to read a good book and speak good english.
If I believe the other theory, the one which states we learn by seeing and doing, and by the way our parents choose to rear us, then I am by far an under-achiever and should be living up to the same principals to which my older siblings live their lives by. Must I really strive to become an uneducated party animal only concerned by what directly affects me? Am I doomed to a life of constant unhappiness and misery, plagued by the feeling that I should have tried harder to do better with my life?
I sure hope not.

Watching my daughter today has been a fulfilling event. If nothing else, it taught me that however much outside influences try to force us one way or the other, and no matter how hard our parents try to teach us right from wrong, good from bad, it ultimately lies with us to make the desicions which will carry us through to adulthood and shape the person we are to become.

That is not to say that we should not at least try to teach our children these important lessons, it is merely just a basis on which we hope they will build upon and not get caught in the traditional stereotypes to which most children find themselves adhereing to.

A popular saying states that we “learn something new everyday” and I have sure learnt a lot in the 10 hours I have been awake so far. I only hope that the lessons I learn from life can be passed to my daughter without being distorted by our modern society. If however, she continues with her life as she has started, she will be everything I myself aspire to be myself. Unfortunately, that also puts her in the minority catagory and thus possibly doomed to always be an outsider.

When did everything get so confusing? Don’t we all try our best as parents? Maybe it’s just a case of differing viewpoints and a lack of “balance” in todays society.
Only the future can know. It is up to us to encourage its discovery and be there to correct any wrongs and support the rights. Afterall, that is all any of us can do.

 

A bit of a rant

I am so sick and tired of turning the computer on every morning to hear about some other poor single parent complaining about how bad the credit crunch is affecting them. Sod them. What about us families with 2 parents and young children?

I’m sorry, this is probably going to piss off quite a few people but single parents are getting the best deal at the moment. The government pay for their houses and most of their bills and those who DO work have their childcare paid for and still manage to make ends meet.

I want to know what’s being done about the rest of us? People who’s partners DO work every single hour availiable to them only to be told that they’re not allowed to do more than 8 hours a day because the companies can’t afford the extra wages? The people who’s partners go off to work EVERY morning without fail, ill or not and then come home after their allowed 8 hours, only to come home to a meal of beans-on-toast and have to change their child’s bottom with only one nappy left in the packet and no money to buy any more until the wages come in.
I’m talking about all us families who skrimp and save, Paying rent, bills and then having to kit out the children who are enevitably going through a growth spurt, needing new shoes, new outfits and bigger nappies.

With the current climate, What are WE meant to do? We still have to pay the same amount of bills, rent and have to eat as well.

And then of course there’s the extras on top of that, for example, clerical errors meaning that more and more people having to pay back more and more debts which they have been forced into. And that of course only increases the amount of outgoings when the money isn’t there TO pay out.

Of course, this rant is mainly because I’m pissed off at the fact that yet again, the government is trying their damndest to screw us all out of our hard-earned money and making it increasingly difficult for anyone to survive and have a good quality of life.

This morning, Alan phoned the council to sort out the court summons which we received last week for non-payment of council tax.
Now of course, we HAVE been paying it, but for some unkown reason, they have only recieved 3 out of 6 payments. needless to say, I made the payments and I know for certain that we HAVE paid it all.
So alan phoned only to be told that we must pay back the £386 in the next 6 months by direct debit or face legal action.
This raises it’s own problem in the fact that I don’t like direct debits. Alan gets paid every 4 weeks and I will now have to leave the money in the bank for anywhere up to 3 extra weeks to pay for the error and pay back the money, just to avoid yet another black mark on our credit file.

Then of course there’s the credit card. Capital one have decided that they are going to send our statements out a month later than they should, If at all. This of course means that the payment date on the statement is a month BEFORE I recieve the statment and so in total, we have had about £100 worth of charges in the last 2-3 months for late payment fees, which then of course push you over your allotted limit, incurring yet ANOTHER fee, which is subject to a 5 day payment before a £35 late payment charge is lumped on.

I have tried to phone them, only to be hung up on 3 times within 10 minutes. So now I am refusing to pay them anything until they reverse and refund ALL charges incurred since we moved in in July. I should have only had about £35 out of my £200 limit spent on the card, but due to their error, I am now at least £70 OVER the limit.

Add to all of this the errors with the housing office and we have been royally screwed over. They have decided that the small amount of housing benefit which we were entitled to (which only JUST covered our shopping bill for a month) has been cut in half because THEY made an error when transferring our details onto the computer system. We told them Alan was paid every 4 weeks, yet they said monthly. We sent all the forms back online and checked them when they came back and everything was correct, yet somewhere, someone managed to tick the wrong box and now WE have to pay back a total of £300 which is now coming out of what we’re entitled to before we even recieve it.

Needless to say that now we are even more strapped for cash than ever before. We will end up paying £150 council tax for the next 6 months, £550 a month rent for a shabby little 2 bedroom flat with leaky windows, no insulation, a floor which is uneven and bends with every step and a tiny kitchen which now poses a risk to our always growing daughter who has discovered that she can not only open the fridge freezer, but also reach the hob.
If you add to that our £25 phone bill, which is non-negotiable, and the food bill.
We don’t eat terribly but manage to get by on £30 a week for food for the 3 of us. So why do we end up paying almost £60 a week on shopping? Nappies. With a newborn, you can get a box of nappies for £10 and in that box would be enough nappies for 2 weeks, roughly 80 nappies. So why is it that when your toddler needs a size 5, you pay £10 a box and only get 45-50 nappies? That’s not enough for a week if you, like most parents have a very active 17 month old toddler who’s drinking plenty, eating and growing almost constantly and getting through 6/7 nappy changes a day. If you add to that the cost of wipes as god forbid we should wash our child’s dirty bum in the limescale encrusted water which slowly drips from our taps on a daily basis, for that would make their skin sore and mean that we have to spend yet more money on over-priced skincare which barely even works!

So here’s the facts.
We need to move into a house. due to my undefined health condition, I can barely leave the house with a not-yet-walking-downstairs toddler and the bag filled with nappies and clothes changes which will inevitably be needed, even for just a 2 hour trip to the local baby group.
We can’t yet move into a house as we are unable to afford the deposit, and even if we could, we Can’t get a mortgage and estate agents always use a credit search to ensure rent can be paid before leasing a property, which means our only hopes lie with private or council.
Heres’ the kicker!
Private costs extra because people don’t pay agency fees but they always ask a higher rental price because they too need to provide for their family.
Council wise, We are NOT entitled to anything from them. Even when we had to move from bournemouth and had NOWHERE to stay, we were still not eligable for a council house or any sort of support from them due to the fact that alan was working!

needless to say that if Alan refused to work, or I was a single mother, (or an immigrant from poland) I’d be entitled to a 3 bedroom house, rent and council tax paid for and STILL have enough for food, holidays and a nice spangly car.
So what are we to do? Alan can’t work extra hours, we can’t physically make ANY more cutbacks as we are already making do with the bare minimum and now we’re having to make it stretch even further!

We also have a wedding to pay for , which I know we decided to do, but we’re fed up of waiting just for convenience sake.
after the wedding, we WERE going to try for a second baby, which is seeming more and more like a good idea, just for the extra money we’d be entitled to. of course, that’s not why we’d have another baby at all, we LOVE being parents and want to expand our family.

That said, with all that’s going on in the economic climate, what is the government doing to help us hard working families? absolutely nothing. The insist on putting up council tax, rather than lowering it, they increase tax on food, which means that we cannot afford to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, and then get accused of bad parenting for not giving our children their “5 a day”. The cost of milk and nappies is constantly going up, without the increase in wages or work hours to make up for the shortfall which most of us are now experiencing.

Then of course there’s the cost of childcare. I could go and get a part time job, but I’d actually be spending more on childcare than I would earn and would effectively be adding another bill to our already long-list.

And so I’m sat here, finishing off my daughters left overs from lunch, waiting for our shopping to be delivered while the other half is working his backside off for next to nothing, just so that we can pay the government workers to go on their fancy holidays and buy their posh cruise ships and their 6 cars. All while us “lower class” families struggle to provide the basics. We’ve already had to get rid of the car, just to save on extra bills and tax payments, and along with it our freedom. It means that we’re all a lot fitter due to all the walking we’re now having to do, but why should we have to be forced into making descisions like this? why should we have to sacrifice our little comforts? Because the government are too busy giving 3 bedroom houses to school drop outs and teenage mothers who are too poorly educated to know how to not have kids. They’re too busy paying money to people who claim that they’re “too fat to work”
It’s all just laziness and ignorance and we’re having to pay for it!

ok, rant over.
god I need a holiday XD