Loneliness and Magnetism
If you've spent any time around people like us, you've noticed something odd: we're often very alone, and yet we keep finding each other anyway.
Not in big communities or branded spaces. More like two lights flickering at the same weird frequency, spotting each other from across a room. A quiet click of recognition, and suddenly you're talking like old friends while everyone else wonders what happened.
Both sides of that—the loneliness and the magnetism—are worth understanding.
The Loneliness
You've probably been told, in various ways, that your loneliness is your own fault.
"You're too picky."
"You're too intense."
"You scare people off."
"Just be more normal."
Sometimes there's social clumsiness in the mix. We're all human. But I don't think that's the core of it.
The way I see it, people like us are like books. Some have shiny covers—charismatic, funny, apparently fine. Some have ugly covers—awkward, blunt, visibly out of sync. Either way, once you open them, you hit the real problem: the book is written in a language most people don't know how to read.
And here's the cruel twist: some of the loneliest people you'll meet are the ones who seem to navigate the social world perfectly.
They have a million faces. They give people the one they can handle. They're charming at parties, smooth in meetings, surrounded by friends who'd swear they know them. They learned the grammar of normal fluently—not because it came naturally, but because they had to. Survival. Camouflage.
But fluency isn't belonging. They speak the language, sure. They just have nothing to say in it that's actually true.
So they perform. And everyone around them connects to the performance, not the person. The loneliness doesn't come from being rejected—it comes from being accepted for a version of yourself that doesn't exist. You're in the room. You're even popular. And you've never been more invisible.
Inside, there's plenty. Depth where small talk is expected. Honesty where polite fiction is expected. Questions where quiet agreement is expected. A refusal to pretend that broken things are fine "because that's just how it is."
Even when someone is genuinely curious—when the cover does catch their interest—they crack the spine, read a page or two, and their brain quietly goes: "I don't know how to process this."
They're not malicious. They just don't have the grammar for you. They try to respond with the tools they have: platitudes, reassurance, gentle suggestions to maybe try being less like that.
From their perspective, they're being kind. From yours, they're talking to a version of you that doesn't exist.
So the pattern repeats. You offer more of the real text. They misread, or flinch, or change the subject. You get shelved again.
After enough rounds of this, it's easy to conclude you're fundamentally unlovable. That you're broken. That you were never meant for people.
Bullshit.
You're not empty. You're not incomprehensible. You're just written in a language that's rare. Rarity doesn't mean "better than everyone else," and it definitely doesn't give you a free pass to be cruel, arrogant, or impossible on purpose. It just means there aren't many automatic readers. You still have to show up, translate where you can, and be a person among other people, not a misunderstood genius floating above them.
And "rare" doesn't mean "no one can ever learn." Every now and then, someone will hit a strange sentence and, instead of closing the book, they'll stay. They'll ask questions. They'll pick up a bit of your vocabulary over time. They may never read you fluently, but they can learn enough to meet you honestly. That counts. Not everyone in your life has to be a perfect translator to be worth keeping.
Locating the problem this way doesn't fix the loneliness. It just locates it correctly: in the mismatch between you and the available readers, not in some essential defect that makes you undeserving of being read at all.
The Magnetism
And yet.
Put a hundred people in a room—office party, wedding, conference, whatever—and watch what happens if you leave a few of us in there long enough.
We drift. We make small talk badly. We orbit the edges.
And then, somehow, two of us end up talking in a corner like we've known each other for ten years.
From the outside, it looks like coincidence. From the inside, it feels different.
Someone makes a joke that's a little too accurate about how broken something is. Someone doesn't laugh at a casual cruelty everyone else found hilarious. Someone says "I don't buy that" in a room that expects polite agreement. Someone listens in a way that doesn't immediately rush to fix, smooth, or deny.
Tiny signals. But if you speak the language, they're deafening.
You notice. They notice you noticing. There's a quiet, mutual click:
"Oh. You."
That's the magnetism of the maladjusted. Not destiny. Not soulmates. Just pattern recognition. "You're also a book in this weird language, and somehow I can actually read your pages."
Picture this: the super popular girl in school, surrounded by friends, always performing, never seen. And the weird emo guy nobody talks to, visibly out of sync, sitting alone at lunch. Completely different social orbits. One drowning in attention, one starved of it.
And somehow they end up walking home together.
Because they recognized something. Same frequency. Same language underneath. Both equally unread, just wearing different covers.
From the outside, it makes no sense. From the inside, it's the most obvious thing in the world.
It's one of the only perks you get: invisible to 95% of the room, but to the 5% that run on a similar frequency, you light up like a flare.
The Trap
Finding someone on your wavelength can feel like a miracle. And it's not hard to see why.
Finally, you don't have to translate every sentence. Finally, you can say the unsanitized version of what you see. Finally, someone hears your "too much" and doesn't look away.
That relief is real. It matters.
The problem is what happens if you stop there.
If all you ever do is trade horror stories, confirm each other's worst beliefs, stay up too late dissecting the same wounds from slightly different angles—then you've built something very specific: two people hugging as they drown.
You're less alone. You're not less underwater.
You've gone from solitary drowning to synchronized drowning. It feels better. It's still the same depth.
Recognition is step one. It's not the destination.
If you find someone on your frequency, great. That's rare. Keep them if you can. Just ask yourself, now and then:
Are we building anything together, or just cataloguing how broken everything is?
Are we helping each other carry the weight, or just validating that it's heavy?
Are we trying to swim, or just holding each other tightly as we sink?
If the honest answer is "we're sinking, but at least we're cuddling"—that's not evil. It's just worth noticing. And if you do notice it, you can decide what to do with it from there.
The Point
The physics are simple.
You're often unread because you're rare, not because you're wrong.
You light up for each other fast because pattern recognition works both ways.
Shared drowning isn't salvation. It's just warmer.
When you find someone who reads your language—and there is a non-zero chance that you might—try to build something. A raft. A direction. Even just a few real sentences exchanged before you go on your way.
You are not alone in being alone. There are other books in your language, even if you haven't met them yet.
Try to swim.
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