Where We Are, and Who We Become
I’ve lived in cities that never sleep and towns where silence is the default language. I’ve walked through Times Square at midnight and down dirt roads in northern New Mexico where the loudest sound is a crow’s wings slicing the air. And what I’ve come to believe is this: geography isn’t just a setting. It shapes us. It seeps into how we think, how we love, how we carry our solitude.
Loneliness, for me, is not just an emotion. It’s a landscape. It has terrain, temperature, weight. It looks different in New York than it does in Taos. And the longer I live — the longer I write — the more convinced I am that where we are has everything to do with how we feel.
Some places amplify our aloneness. Others soften it. And sometimes, we seek out certain geographies not to escape loneliness, but to understand it better.
The City and the Crowd
When I was younger, I lived in New York City. Like many writers, I was drawn to the chaos — the sense that something important was always happening, just out of reach. I spent my days working odd jobs and my nights in loud rooms, surrounded by people who were also pretending not to be lonely.
In cities, you’re never truly alone — but that doesn’t mean you aren’t lonely. In fact, I’ve often felt more isolated in a crowd than I ever have on a quiet mountainside. There’s something uniquely hollow about standing shoulder to shoulder with a thousand strangers, none of whom look at you, all of whom are rushing toward something you don’t fully understand.
Urban loneliness is a kind of performance. You learn to walk fast, talk confidently, look busy. You disguise your isolation with movement. You keep your headphones in, your head down, your calendar full. But at night, when the show is over, the silence in your apartment can feel cavernous.
And yet, I loved the city. I still do. It’s where my writing began to take shape, where I learned to observe, to document, to feel both invisible and deeply awake. The city sharpened my mind. But it also frayed something softer in me — something I didn’t fully recover until I left.
The Desert and the Silence
Now I live in the mountains outside Taos, New Mexico, in a small adobe house with creaking floors and wide, starlit skies. There are days when I don’t speak to another person. There are weeks when my only real conversations are with the pages of my notebook. Out here, loneliness has a different flavor — slower, quieter, more reflective.
Rural loneliness doesn’t hide behind noise. It walks beside you, like a shadow. But in its stillness, there is clarity. Out here, I’ve learned to listen — not just to the wind or the coyotes or the sound of my own breath, but to the parts of myself that city life drowned out.
This place doesn’t ask anything of me. It doesn’t care if I’m productive, connected, impressive. It just is. And in that simplicity, I’ve found a kind of companionship I didn’t expect — with the land, with my memories, with the long, patient work of being human.
Choosing Our Loneliness
We don’t always get to choose where we live. Sometimes, geography is shaped by family, by finances, by work. But we do, at some point, choose how to relate to the places we inhabit. We choose whether to let them numb us or awaken us. We choose whether to escape into them or emerge from them more whole.
For years, I thought of loneliness as a failure — as something to fix or flee. Now I see it as a companion, one that changes depending on where I am. In the city, it hums like a fluorescent light, constant and unnoticed until night falls. In the desert, it drips slowly, like snowmelt — quiet but present, asking me to sit with it, to know it.
Place doesn’t cure loneliness. But it does give it shape. And once something has shape, it can be named, examined, even embraced.
A Different Kind of Connection
There’s a popular belief that connection happens best in cities — where people are close, where opportunity buzzes. But I’ve found some of my deepest connections in remote places — not just with people, but with myself, with nature, with the stories I carry.
When we remove the constant input — the screens, the sirens, the social obligations — we’re left with something raw and honest. That can be frightening. But it can also be freeing. Because loneliness isn’t always a void. Sometimes, it’s a doorway.
In the quiet, I’ve reconnected with the parts of myself that don’t need to be seen to feel real. In the mountains, I’ve remembered that attention — not affection — is the first language of love. And in the geography of loneliness, I’ve begun to map something more enduring: the inner landscape of presence.
Closing the Distance
We talk about loneliness as if it’s always a problem. But I’ve come to believe it’s a teacher — one that reveals what we long for, and where we’ve stopped listening. The city taught me how to see. The desert taught me how to stay. And both taught me that no matter where we are, we’re always carrying pieces of the other — the crowd and the quiet, the noise and the stillness.
Maybe the work isn’t to escape loneliness, but to understand what it’s trying to show us — about our needs, our rhythms, and the places that help us become ourselves.