It is Better to Be Alone than Abused: Loneliness in Our Society

This is a tragic story about a lady named Pia Farrenkopf who was discovered 5 years after she died, mummified in the back seat of her car in her garage. No one checked on her. No one realized she was missing. This is the loneliness of nightmares. Sadly as our society breaks apart, and social connections die, these stories become more widespread. Hers is not the first I remember reading about. Pia's story to me is very sad. I wonder if she was an Aspie too though an Aspie in this case who had computer skills allowing her to maintain a middle class lifestyle.

I don't feel as alone now before as I have years earlier.  I do have some good local friends, they call and check on me. Even people I am acquaintances with ask after me around here. My town is friendly. My friends and I have fun times together. My husband is with me everyday. He worries about me and keeps track of me. I have a ton of long distance friends I write to and call. Some of them I am very close to as well. My husband and friends are very important to me.

The isolation of disability though can hit hard. It takes me years to make friends. I am Aspie and unlike a neurotypical it can take me 5 years in a new community to even make a friend or two.  I am not one of those people with 1100 friends on Facebook, or with a party to go to every weekend. There are many times where I do worry that I and my husband are far too isolated though we work to change this. At least half of my social life due to my circumstances is conducted online. My husband only has one living relative, a sister who never has visited us. Also if I won the Lotto tomorrow, forget buying the new house and rest, the first year would be spent visiting friends nationwide. There's at least 12  people I'd go visit in different towns right off with rests in between.

We have moved too much too. While I like my present community and need its medical care, my life has been full of too many goodbyes. As economic nomads, the constant moving for survival just meant roots being constantly ripped up and thrown away.  I wrote about my grief of leaving my old loved small town. More grief was piled on as more and more people including several friends died. Even my old church closed and three-four of my old favorite hangouts burned down. It would take years to even talk about the place without crying anymore.  I told my husband 4 years ago, I will not move anymore and have stuck to this. I cannot bear to live in a place again where "no one knows my name".

When I went no contact, one old long distance friend was kind of against it, though I told her it was my life is at stake, and she came around. One thing she said to me was, "If you keep cutting everyone off, you will end up alone!" She acted like it would be my fault if I ended up alone. This went through my heart like a stake. Why? Because it is something that many people worry about in their heart being alone.  I believe there are many ACONS who cling to rotten abusers because they fear the desolation of "having nobody". For those of us who do part ways from narcissists and in many cases entire toxic narcissistic family systems you do worry about the ramification of your decisions.

My response to her was, "It is better to be alone than abused!"

One of my commenters pointed out this story in the video above to me. She pointed out her theory that Pia was an ACON. I think it is very probable. One thinks about stories about Tiffany Sedaris and other stories where they have no family to check on them. No one is there to care. They go unnoticed and invisible, they are cut out. No one is concerned about what becomes of them. Pia had nine siblings, where were they all? Why did everyone disappear? Where were any friends?

When I was young, I had times of extreme loneliness. In school there were times I did not have one friend in between family moves and other circumstances.  I did not know my husband yet during my first no contact and I had no family. My college friends had all moved home after graduation. When I moved out of my boarding house, into my first apartment on my own which was three rooms on the bottom floor of an old house in a poor neighborhood, I was totally alone.   My work hours were long but when times of unemployment hit, or there was a weekend with no work hours, sometimes it got scary sitting there and knowing I was so alone. I had no where to go, no one to see and no one to talk to. The long distance phone calls cost a lot more back then. Life seemed to pass with just a series of strangers going my way.  I knew no one who lived within 100 miles of me outside of co-workers. In my case, I'd hang out at the library or looking at the art at the local art center. Sure, I volunteered and took classes or went to church but it was just me, myself and I.

This was one very painful aspect of my first no contact. My journals lamented my pain, as I asked, "Why don't I have anyone?" This is the legacy of our abusive narcissistic parents too.  If you are the scapegoat they lead others to reject and ignore you and consider you unimportant. It isolates us to the extreme. I realize entire groups of people turned their backs on me because of my mother including entire families of neighbors and family friends. This went through my narcissistic family like a virus. I just wasn't important enough. As I wrote in one comment, one of my long time friends said, "They just didn't like you!" and sadly it was true. However they never knew me and my mother set that up in her own nefarious way.

The world figures out who doesn't have supportive kinfolk and sees you as prey. They have destroyed your ego and confidence and ability for self care to help you survive in what can be a very cold and hard world. For a socially awkward Aspie, alienation comes with the territory and this quadrupled the social problems. Watching other people who had loving families who "had their backs" and were active part of their lives without disdain and reluctance could be very painful. Other ACONs I am sure have shouted "Why me?". I find myself in awe of those in families where they mean something to the other people.

Fear came with being so alone. There were times I would be in the hospital with severe asthma attacks and no one would be there at all.  Thoughts of dying unmissed and unnoticed and in a pauper's grave went through my head. These are the days I started crying out to God before I became a Christian. Those kind of times change a person. While solitude to me can be a pleasant thing with time to think and do art work, I am scared to death of ever being that alone again. I don't think I could handle it.  The me of today is not physically capable of living alone too, which is a whole other ball of wax.

I never want to live alone in an apartment, disabled and forlorn. So many people in our society who are elderly and disabled, are isolated in this way. It worries me. Why does our society do this? Forgetting the elderly and disabled and shunting them away. Some people don't even have families, I never had children and know what that means while others had children and families, they are ignored after they move away. It is my life's endeavor to reach out to other lonely people. One thing about me is I often do reach out to elderly people and others.

 Our society is one sick place, closing everyone away in little boxes [apartments] to be alone and with no one to talk to. Even if I am concerned about Agenda 21 and other manipulations, cohousing sounds good to me, those wanting to rebuild community between neighbors and people, many have some good intentions I agree with. Who wants a life of just staring at walls with no one to talk to? I know I don't. One reason you may see me screaming against the housebound tsunami, is I know it guarantees more social isolation, it is even a test on the relationships I manage to form.

One thing I think about my narcissistic mother is that she never has been lonely. She never had one period in her life where there was no one there, this is the same for Mini-Me.  They don't even relate to emotions like this. They didn't end up outside the reservation with no one to talk to. She grew up with a close knit family surrounded by at least a hundred relatives. In her case, she takes people for granted, there are so many surrounding her. Could she even feel lonely though? If you are not attached to people you will not miss them. This is something I noticed about my sister too, no feelings of nostalgia or missing people there either. It was scary to see. My sister isn't as popular and lives a more isolated life then my mother but in this case does not care.

Our narcissistic society is having it's social connections breaking down. Others who are not disabled have told me they are just as alone, or they may have people they are friendly with but are not close to. They know something has gone wrong. Others tell me how difficult it has become to meet people. I cry reading the stories like this where someone dies alone and not cared about and unloved. Why didn't a neighbor or even an acquaintance check on her? Some may say, "Maybe she pushed everyone away!" but no one deserves to be that alone. I do believe the family connections are breaking down more and more. People took more time to visit each other. Some families stay intact despite long distance putting the energy and visits in, while others break apart. If there is a narcissist in the midst, they hog all the attention and people and leave none for you.

I still think it is better to be lonely then abused, no matter how hard loneliness can be. You really are still alone if you are keeping company with those who do not respect you or care about you. I know I never had a family, or people there for me. They didn't like me decades ago and the die was cast.  More room can be made in one's life for good people when energy is not being wasted on those who make you feel alone.

How many lonely people are there out there? How many lonely ACONs to eat their cup of soup and sandwich in front of their blaring TV at night with no one to share the hours of their life with? How many were cut off via the smear campaigns? How many elderly and disabled feeling the pain of no one there who really cares about them?  How many lost their families to the wicked machinations of narcissists? No one deserves to die alone like Pia did. No one.

Psalm 27:10 Though my mother and father forsake me then the Lord will take me up.