I have spent virtually my entire life profoundly alone. Although in the proximity of others....

I have spent virtually my entire life profoundly alone. Although in the proximity of others, where I live psychologically is profoundly different from almost everyone else in our culture. For the first third, or even half, of my decades I figured there was something very inadequate about me that caused this. For the next 3rd, two, of my decades I accepted that it had to do with some undeserved goodness in me but the pain of the solitude drove me to try and do the impossible, to merge where I was with where other people are. It is not possible neither in physics or in psychology. By now my solitude is as familiar to me as a beautiful sunrise, the pure smile of a young child, the honesty of a squirrel. There are still moments, like now, when I so wish that I did not live so psychologically alone. But then I kind of laugh. I don't know that Lewis and Clark were at all admirable people, but they certainly set out into essentially unknown territory in search of some truth, and surely they had no illusion that solitude would not be a price of their journey. Through no choice or credit on my part I am built to seek and to live the truth that other people seek to deny with their entire strength because of the cost and pain associated with such truth. By definition such a person is seeking solitude, traveling toward perpetual, unending, never to end... solitude, in the way that Lewis and Clark were, for a time, though in neither case was solitude the goal. Lol. Dorothy Day wrote a book entitled, the long loneliness. I don't think I have read it, & I wonder if this is what she had in mind.