If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.

I remember my breaking-point like it was yesterday: standing in the shower and crying, lukewarm water running all over my head like my thoughts. The sensation of alone-ness was frequently on my mind, so isolation was a recurring sensation.

Growing into an adult I always felt alone, as I thought life was not developing the way I wanted it. Financial obligations demanded too much energy; marriage was oddly draining; and most unsettlingly, the cousins I loved so much were more distant than I ever thought they would be. No one was to blame for that, but life at nearly thirty and rarely speaking was a little uncomfortable when I compared it to all the memories of our childhood togetherness.

And by my mid-thirties it seemed apparent I would not have all the friends I in my twenties believed I’d have.

Detachment from my family was not the only reason I was alone — but my neglected relationships were the biggest metaphor for the direction life seemed to be pushing me.

Standing there under hot water, I thought something must be wrong with me because it seemed like everyone had someone to understand them. I didn’t.

At forty my unintentional ways of relationship-building weighed heavily and exploded before that shower. Eventually divorce was my funeral, and a new growing understanding that corrective self-honesty was the only possible afterlife.

Today at fifty I contemplate the culling of relationships over my lifetime, and now I celebrate it.

I never really bought the idea that man is a social creature, anyway. At least not the thoughtful among us. That sentiment always confused me, until I stopped comparing myself to often thoughtless ideas about relationships.

It is to our detriment that we from the beginning are not more selective about our surroundings and to whom we expose ourselves. Isolation should carry no social stigma: we need untaught solitude. Otherwise, we will never know who we are, and we will die alone among others.