It’s Lonely Being Unique

Cool: My amazing life
Stupid: The resulting isolation

Before I get started, I would like to emphasize my appreciation of my amazing life seeing the world. It is definitely my choice. I can’t imagine life any other way and I am thankful continuously.

But it is lonely.

I am not lonely on the ship, with 650 of my closest friends all of us seeing the world together.

But coming home is surprisingly lonely. It is not just the lack of twenty people at my breakfast, lunch and dinner table and constantly running into people in every city I go to in the world.

It is the fact that I have nothing to say to people now that I am home. People talk about TV shows and current affairs which I have no knowledge of. I can talk of cities, places and sites that they have no knowledge of. In some cases, my sharing a casual experience about the ten year old girl playing the accordion on the train going to Rome is treated as if I am bragging, instead of being what it actually is, at least for me, just a run of the mill story about being on the train the other day.

A while back a woman who worked aboard told me about this problem. She would go home and no one really wanted to hear about her travels nor could they relate. I thought she had the wrong circle of friends. But that was not it. When two of my friends are talking about their cars and repairs, I no longer can relate. I don’t have a car most of the year. I don’t think about repairs. They may talk about this awesome new restaurant they found and if I chime in with the awesome restaurant I recently discovered, the fact that it is in Venice seems to ruin the conversation. “Last month when I was in Croatia…” just seems to create glazed eyes.

Then there is the trickle away of friends. Out of sight, out of mind, slowly forgotten. It is not just that every time I return to Santa Barbara I have once less friend living in town. It is also that every time I return, people just aren’t as interested in seeing me after six months away.

I think for a lot of people it is hard. They ask me what I have done in the last five months. I say Croatia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Monacco, etc. I ask them what they have done, and they say, “Same ol’ same ol’.” It is as if I am rubbing my life style in their face.

So, now I find it more comfortable to simply say, “Work as usual,” and down play the awe found in so many places all over the world.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you lead an incredible life and no one wants to hear it, is it really incredible?

ABSOLUTELY.

Incredibly cool.

But not being able to relate in the usual casual conversations, is a bit, well, stupid, and lonely.