The Lonely Pursuit Of Dream Building

I am doing the best work of my life. My support network is wider and deeper than ever. Why do I feel more lonely than at any time in my adulthood?

Photo by Ian Walker

Six months ago I set out on my first solo tour, walked away from my career of 23 years, and dove into a life of intention, creation, and purpose. It is one of the scariest and most marvelous things I have ever done in my life. My days are now largely filled with a purpose that they had lacked for a very long time. The work that I am doing here at WAIM is continually improving and expanding. It’s all going pretty well, and we haven’t even hit the one year mark.

I have already discussed the financial challenges that I have faced in walking away from a steady professional gig with a regular paycheck. Instead of automatic deposits on the first and fifteenth, I have to hustle all the time for my daily bread. I drive Uber and Lyft, play regular solo shows, do freelance design work, and of course, I publish every single day here at What Am I Making. It’s a living, but it is an anxiety-inducing way to survive; for the moment that anxiety is worth the wealth of my own schedule, and my own priorities.

Surprisingly, the money portion of this severe life change has not been the most difficult aspect to adjust to. While I have ever known genuine, abject poverty before, I am intimately familiar with living under an austerity budget and making the most of a dollar. I have lived life on the financial edge more than once and while it is not pleasant, it can be managed, if at least for a few months whilst I make this new life a possibility. Money is a regular challenge, but it is secondary on my list of concerns at the moment.

What is number one you ask? Loneliness. Loneliness is my biggest foe at the moment.

Loneliness? It almost sounds ridiculous to type it on the page. A dude like me cannot be lonely. I have a terrific, tight knit family unit, a ton of friends, and a community of people with whom I am familiar enough to ask for help at a moments’ notice. Yet, after months of careful study, I have discovered that what I am sensing is a form of loneliness. It might be new to me, but it is rampant in our culture, particularly with men of a certain age.

My work here at WAIM has become the main focus of my life since I returned from tour in late July, 2023. Over the last six or so months, I have made this space the epicenter of my creative work. I believe that what I am doing is both valuable and important on some level. That work, in my mind, has also consistently gotten better over that timeframe as well. But the work can be isolating.

Writing is largely a solitary pursuit. It certainly is the way that I do it. To write every day in the way that I do means I spend several hours each day in the sheddio alone with my own thoughts, words, and emotions. Between the written work, the podcast, the radio show, and more, I spend somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week on this endeavor. While that time might feature an hour or two of interviewing a guest or reaching out to someone for a piece, it is almost all solitary work inside a two hundred square foot shed.

I am spending an additional 40 hours +/- a week driving rideshare. While that does involve interactions with riders, even the best conversations are temporary and often only surface level. The very best rides, those that go deep or provide a unique window into someone’s life are an amazing gift for my gig, but they are rare, and again fleeting.

For more than two decades I interacted with customers, school officials, teachers, administrators, parents, and colleagues hawking graduation regalia. While customers were often a genuine pain in the ass, I’ve learned that I miss that personal interaction with my school contacts who were as much like friends to me as they were clients. It is truly the only thing that I miss about my job. It seems now that I work remotely both physically, and as emotionally separate from the rest of the world. That has been my deepest struggle in not having a conventional job for these last six months.

The Stick Arounds at Ziggy’s Bar in Ypsilanti, MI, November, 2023.

As I have increased my intention and focus on my work here, and as a solo performer, it has taken time and energy away from my bands, The Stick Arounds and Harborcoat. The Sticks in particular are the center of my social world. They are some of my very best friends, and people with whom I might spend even more time with than my own family, in a given year. Our bond is still strong but as we all go off to invest in other, very worthwhile projects, there is less day to day interaction with each of them, and that too has compounded my loneliness.

It’s hard also to not chalk some of this up to age. My children are well into their twenties, and despite having a great relationship with them, they have their own lives, objectives, and priorities. Kimmy, my wife, works retail management and her schedule varies intensely, and the physical work she does each day takes a severe toll on her body, and on her energy levels. As we have gotten older, it has gotten harder for us to find time to do things together with the same energy and verve that we once had.

Depression, which is of course deeply woven into loneliness, can then begin to take a physical as well as emotional toll. The inertia begins building so that the depression, the lack of available time, and the tiredness begin to converge into one insurmountable snowball careening down the proverbial mountain.

Exiting the holidays, it’s hard not to look down the long barrel of a grey January and feel a new heft and loneliness in the air and to begin to wonder just how dark things might get before the sun returns. In the meantime, I must follow up with, and follow through for, the ones I love and need in my life. I need to remind myself that the work can wait.

Cheers,

Matty C