Lonely. That's how I'm feeling.
Bitcoin taught me that sovereignty is learning how to tolerate the discomfort of being alone. It sounds almost obvious, y' know? No custodians, no one except you holding your keys. No institutions promising that everything is OK. Sovereign means that you have to take responsibility.
We usually talk about the attractive side of the equation. You know...freedom, independence, self-custody, verify everything...but responsibility has the less romantic side and that is: you're on your own, there's no one to call.
Sometimes you make the decision and live with it. You make a mistake, there's no customer support, the price of independence is (maybe) uncertainty. Relationships with people can expose something similar. I don't know about you guys but there's a strange temptation to outsource parts of ourselves to other people. Calm, validation, the feeling of being wanted, even the ability to enjoy a good day.
Someone becomes the person we tell everything to. A special person, the one who confirms that what happened to us mattered, the person we look when sometimes goes wrong...or right. When that person dissapears, is like...a silence feels enormus. The natural thing is to fill it. With anything: person, conversation, distraction, anything that prevent us from sitting with the uncomfortble truth: that perhaps we had outsourced more of ourselves than we thought.
We always repeat not your keys, not your coins...maybe there's an emotional version of that idea too. We, humans, are social creatures, relationships are valuable precisely because we share parts of ourselves with others but there's a tiny difference between sharing your life and outsourcing your ability to live it.
Freedom is beautifil...until responsibility arrives.
Emotional sovereignty begins when we enjoy company without needing someone else to constantly protect us from our own silence.
Just some thoughts in my sadness...
I’m sorry for how you’re feeling. I hope writing this made you feel better. Remember, emotions are like waves. They come and go.
I think this is related to what Ernest Becker called transference in The Denial of Death.
It’s when you turn to a doctor, girlfriend, therapist, or whoever your hero happens to be in the moment, and put all your hopes, meaning, and sense of the future into them.
Does that sound like what you meant?
Thanks for sharing!
Writing is the only way I know to take out all the negative sensation I have. I don't want to keep it, so I try to make something useful of it, like this post.
And yes, for almost 20 years of my life, I had someone to share all my glories, mistakes and life. Now, that I'm on my own, it's everything new to me. I don't know if I'm gonna be alright, honestly, I don't think about it but I don't want to feel this by my own, so I'm trying to make something useful of it. Keep the loneliness for me is not good, as a matter of fact, some months ago, I found Grateful Space, a nostr-web-grateful room, which reminds me every day that I should thank for all the good things I'm developing on my life because I won't stop to grow.
It's just...that I'm now harvesting my labors, I feel this need of showing someone what I accomplished. Since I'm alone, I have two states at once: I'm happy for myself because I made it and I'm sad because....I'm alone.
Not your keys, not your coins | not your core, not your peace.
It’s brutal realizing how much emotional bandwidth we unknowingly delegate to someone else until they're gone and the node goes offline.
not your core, not your peace.
Wow...
I completely agree on your last point of enjoying your own self company. I joke around with myself all the time saying that I am my own best friend. And I mean that. I spend a lot of time with myself - talking aloud on my walks in the wood on things that I'm thankful for, things that I need to work on, and even make myself laugh. To me this is a superpower of sorts. If you can achieve this level of what you call "silence" then you're doing well. Onward.
I'm not a big fan of the silence and be alone in this world. Can I be in silence with myself? Yes, it's something that I've been working on in the past 11 months since some dramatic events in my personal life.
I recognize some progress, need more work but I know it takes time.