Let’s discuss loneliness.

I suffer from depression.¹ There are things that make it better (like hanging out with friends) and things that make it worse (like not hanging out with friends) and it’s been one of the things foremost on my mind when I was planning to ditch everything and hit the road. While I’m traveling in and around places where I have friends² this isn’t a huge concern. But I simply don’t know enough people to do that consistently, and I certainly don’t want to burn out my welcome with those I do know. Besides, there are visa issues to consider. So practically speaking, I have to spend time on my own.

This would be less fraught if I were especially good at striking up conversations with strangers or walking into a bar at the start of an evening and leaving with a bunch of friends. I’m just not. There are flattering³ and unflattering⁴ ways of spinning this about myself but the end result is that I’m uncomfortable in crowds and usually happier sitting in a corner reading a book. I want heartfelt one-on-one interactions with friends, not passing interactions with acquaintances.

So this particular jaunt — the whole three weeks I’ve spent in Croatia — was a test. How does being alone feel? Can I spend that much time by myself without mucking up my brain chemistry? Will it be a grim countdown until I can leave, or can I actually relax and enjoy myself for extended periods of solitude?

I felt incredibly alienated when I landed in Zagreb. I’m still not sure why; I hopped in a cab and found my AirBnB and checked in and ran out to buy some quick supplies⁵ and went back and locked the door and just kind of collapsed. After a couple hours for downtime I still didn’t really want to leave but knew I needed to run out and eat something besides potato chips so I dragged myself outside and went looking for a restaurant or something. And … I don’t know what I felt. Maybe it was the travel, maybe it was the language barrier, maybe it was just that I had a pretty big lunch and wasn’t particularly hungry yet. But the thought of going into a place and puzzling through the menu and ordering some food just felt impossible.

I wandered around aimlessly for about 20 minutes. Couldn’t find any place that looked inviting. At one point I went into a supermarket and vaguely considered buying bread and mayo and cheese but didn’t. And then, finally, I found a small bakery still open late and was able to go in and buy a small cheese pastry. That’s all I wanted. I munched on it on the way back to my room, tucked myself in, and went to sleep.

Even in the middle of all that, discombobulated with blood sugar at low ebb, I wasn’t all that lost or depressed. I had a place to crash. I had food available. I could have called in sick to work the next day and just binge-watched Doctor Who. And it’s at least somewhat comforting to know, in a crisis — at least a minor one, like that — I’m able to scrape myself together and carry on.⁶

My first weekend I spent wandering around the city,⁷ checking out the open air market, taking the funicular⁸ up to the oldest part of the city, eating street food while walking — roast corn and roast chestnuts are everywhere — then wandering down Tkalčićeva Street⁹ to the cathedral.

I did take the time to visit a few of the museums, including the Museum of Broken Relationships¹⁰ which, if you’ve been alone and obsessing over it, is probably not a great idea. It was founded by a couple of artists who broke up and then joked about starting a museum to house all their shared possessions. The exhibits are all mementos of relationships — letters, stuffed animals, ticket stubs, vacation photographs — with a write-up by the donor detailing the breakup.

There’s something quietly radical about the museum, in a way. Most museums implicitly suggest what’s being displayed is grand or important: here is the most celebrated art, the most significant fossils, the most critical historic events. That’s not the case here. This takes tiny moments of human pain and disconnection and presents them exactly as that. The passionate affair that ended because you wanted to try and make your marriage work? The on-again-off-again casual relationship that lasted a decade until you moved away? That person you spent a magical afternoon with once twenty years ago and never saw again? Not important, in the vast scope of the world. Essential just the same. Worth remembering. Worth memorializing, in its own small way.

Some of the exhibits are funny, some are poignant, some are sad. The totality of the effect, story after story of love and loss, was deeply affective.

I sat in a café afterwards and had a long think. Then I went for ice cream.

There’s been a lot of research on the long-term effects of loneliness.¹¹ It’s subtle but serious, and goes far beyond the obvious effects on anxiety and depression. It raises your stress hormones and blood pressure, which sets in motion processes which cause chronic health problems. You have trouble sleeping and focusing on work. Your immune system suffers, which makes you less resilient to disease. It kills you.

So why risk it? Why travel at all, or at least why travel places I don’t know anybody for longer than a couple days? For me, I guess it’s because I’ve been feeling my social network fray for some time now. As I’ve mentioned, the past few years have seen a number of my friends leave New York City, and I haven’t been able to rebuild that network into something that works. It feels like I’m always cobbling together my social support among people I’m hundreds if not thousands of miles away from.

So the exchange seems to be trading that constant low-level disconnection for a mix of close connections (when I see friends) and a higher risk of isolation (when I’m alone). And whatever else it holds, the changing scenery brings its own consolations.

It’s been interesting being somewhere strange for two weeks and having to figure out things on my own. That’s long enough to find a rhythm to a city. You have enough time to revisit a restaurant or a bar you particularly liked, to come back to a museum if you arrived as it was closing, to remember the trams run surprisingly quietly so be sure to look both ways before crossing the street.

And it turns out I really like Zagreb. The city core is charming in that old European way while still being modern. There’s a ton of restaurants within a 10 minute walk of where I stayed, and the restaurants are of a much wider variety than I found in Split.¹³ Plus the city is far less touristy. It’s a great place to spend a low-key couple of weeks where you’re half-tourist and half-not. I particularly like how late the restaurants and cafés are open. It’s nice to be able to leave my apartment at at quarter to ten in the evening and walk through the pedestrian area of the city filled with tables and people just relaxing or having a drink or a meal.

So I’ve enjoyed my time here. It’s been calming. I’ve done very little in my two weeks. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around, nothing particular to do. I saw a movie,¹² caught a couple museums, wasted a couple evenings watching passersby, wandered through a mall. I did go to a bar night for expats, which was a mistake. I had a short conversation with the person organizing the event when I arrived, then spent an awkward 15 minutes standing around having a cocktail. No one approached me to chat. It just made me feel more depressed and alone than I did being by myself. So I left.

There’s a sculptural installation in Zagreb called Nine Views. In 1971 an artist created a sculpture named The Grounded Sun, basically a large gold metal sphere. It was installed in 1994 in Bogovićeva Street. 10 years later, with very little publicity, a different artist created models of the planets to the same scale and installed them all over the city, at the appropriate distances. It’s not even well known to locals; I had to explain to more than one confused taxi driver why I was insisting on being driven to the outskirts.

I had come across a couple of these while I walked around, and decided to visit all of them before I left. This turned out to be a great decision — while Mercury through Mars are all in the downtown area, Jupiter’s a 15 minute walk away, and Saturn’s about 15 minutes further than than. And the outer planets require a cab or public transit. It forced me to go beyond the places I had already seen, through residential neighborhoods and industrial parks, past apartment blocks and strip malls and big box stores. And all that travelling gives you a lot of time to think and reflect, on the size of the universe, the vastness of distance, and how small and isolated we are in the face of it.

And maybe that’s the heart of it all, the fundamental truth. Orson Welles famously said “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” We are not the physics of our bodies, our positions or velocity through space, the places we’ve inhabited or the air we’ve breathed. We are the connections we’ve made, or haven’t; the people we choose to love or choose to hate or choose to ignore; the conversations that went far too deep and lasted far too long.

I’m writing this on my last evening in Zagreb, while sitting out on the promenade at Amélie, an excellent cake shop just south of the cathedral. I’ve spent the last hour sipping a cocoa, nibbling at a pastry, and reading pulp sci fi. It’s a cool, fall evening. I’ve apparently tricked Werner Heisenberg, having a pretty good idea of where I am and where I’m heading. And I’m ready to spend some more time with friends.

Next: Basel (EAP) to Copenhagen (CPH)
Prev: Split (SPU) to Zagreb (ZAG)

Footnotes

¹ First, I really don’t like the language we use to talk about mental illness. I don’t “suffer” from depression if I’m not currently depressed. I certainly don’t “live with” depression like it’s a lousy roommate. I am “prone” to depression, although since it’s often flirting around the edges of my perception it does have a near constant effect on the way I perceive and interact with the world, even if it’s more often on the level of a buzzing fruit fly than a rampaging triceratops. We need better words for “I am predisposed to displaying symptoms of X although I may or may not presently have those symptoms.”

Second, there’s a fair amount of clinical confusion over whether what my brain does actually is depression. I’ve been diagnosed as bipolar (unlikely), as having chronic depression (plausible), as having seasonal affective disorder (possible), and as not having a flavor of depression at all but instead having symptoms of ADHD which manifest as depression (also plausible). It’s most likely a mix of stuff; mental disorders tend to be built up of a lot of small factors, so there’s a lot of variety in how they manifest and the degree of severity when then do. At any rate, whatever I have looks a lot like depression and responds in much the same way, so that’s what I’m calling it for the purposes of this essay.

² Or, even better, crashing with them for a week or so. Which, by the way, if you’ve a guest room or a couch and can host for a few days here or there, please let me know.

³ I’m ADHD which makes these difficult places to navigate in the first place, and deeply introverted to boot, which means in exchange I feel incredibly empathically connected to all the friends I do happen to make and will do whatever I can if you need help.

⁴ I’m ADHD which means I’m distractible and not fully paying attention, even when I’m alone with someone, even when I’d like to be. “My full attention” usually tops out at about 80%. And if there’s a television running in the corner of my vision or a lot of ambient noise, it’s a lot less than that.

⁵ Diet soda, potato chips, and flavored water. Don’t judge me.

⁶ This is what psychologists call “resilience,” the ability to weather a crisis and recover afterwards. It’s also something you can actually practice and get better at, by getting better at self-care, and learning to act decisively, and meditating.

If you feel you’re prone to anxiety and crises, it’s worth looking up. It’s good to be able to avoid problems. It’s better to be able to recover from them.

⁷ Another walking tour courtesy of Rick Steves.

⁸ Funiculì funiculà!

⁹ The touristy restaurant district. Until World War II, it was the touristy red light district.

¹⁰ I highly recommend you check it out. There’s an outpost in LA, which is potentially easier to visit for a lot of the people reading this, I expect.

¹¹ Much of it done by one of my advisors in grad school, which is how I know about it.

¹² Sadly, there’s still a very limited choice of vegetarian options most places. But there’s Indian places and burger joints and Turkish restaurants, all of which can be reliable (curries and veggie burgers and hummus).

I have been relying a bit too much on pizza, I’ll admit. And there’s a vegan takeaway two doors down from my AirBnB, which is fantastic for a quick lunch.

¹³ Zagreb doesn’t have English-language movie theaters. Apparently they don’t bother dubbing foreign movies, so they don’t need them.

Word of warning: if you’re seeing a movie with foreign language subtitles, and the movie has sections that would be subtitled in English, well, I’ve got bad news for you.