solitude vs. loneliness

yea...there's definitely a difference between the two. solitude is when you just need a while to look life in the eye, say "hang on a sec" and then back off just a little bit. solitude is nice, because you get to be by yourself and pretend that nothing, and nobody else in the world exists. solitude is knowing that you can put off all false pretenses for a while, knowing that you'll still be able to enter back into society whenever you feel like it. it's a nice feeling, and never unwanted.

loneliness - that's different though. it's when you're all by yourself and no one is there around you. more specific, it's when you're by yourself, and everyone else around you is oblivious to the fact that you're there by yourself when you don't want to. loneliness is that empty hole that kinda gnaws at you. it's not like being in a prison cell, because you're not being locked in there in your state of loneliness - but it's when you're walking along on a deserted road with other people, but all of sudden they walk on ahead of you, and you're just left there walking by yourself.

it's always loneliness that gets at me though. all through high school - it was always loneliness because i was always stuck working or studying at home while my friends went out and had fun. mostly because i was never let out of the house. it got to the point where my friends even stopped asking me to go places with them, because they knew the answer was gonna be "i can't..."

so i guess i never had that "set" group of friends to hang out with. during the summer after high school was when i finally met people who i can really consider to be the first friends i was really able to hang out with whenever and whereever. and man..it makes a difference. there's just a kind of bond that's created whenever you hang out with people a lot.

and then came MIT...well MIT is a different story.

i don't really know what i'm getting at here, since i've long lost the ability to write coherently, but i guess this is all getting back at the theme of doing too much work and not being able to hang out and enjoy life with other people.

for example. i guess the thing that made me the saddest was when i did the md anderson program again this summer and lived at rice again. i had no idea that i was going to be working most of the time...i'd leave the dorm around 7 am and then get back at 8 PM. meaning that i never got to see anyone else first of all - and when i got back, i was usually so tired that i didn't go hang out on the other floors with other people. i regret doing that. i didn't get to really know any of the other people until almost the end of june, and by that time, i had already missed out on so much. and then, most of the time, the same cycle happened over again - i got so busy that people just stopped coming up to my room to find me. i mean, valentina and mandy came up several times to chat, zach came up once in a while (once because he wanted to learn how to sqaure dance HAHAHA), and kiran came by whenever we had one of our deep conversations in the middle of the night. towards the end of the program it got a lot better just because the work tapered off. but still. those bouts of loneliness.

and now. even in new territory. i've lost touch with so many of my austin HS friends. part of the reason is that they're all at the same schools with each other, moving on without me.