I feel uncomfortable in my own world. Being alone bothers me. I have always felt the need to share my world, my mind and my feelings with someone. How I feel about myself seems less important than what other people think of me. I'm afraid of being alone. And so are we all. We all seem to be continually searching for someone who will truly love and understand us. Someone to give us a purpose in life. And yet, I think we are all essentially alone. We are alone in our thoughts and emotions. The first time I really felt alone was when I was leaving Kentucky. We were at the airport to say our last goodbyes. I left everything and everyone I loved, understood, cared for, to come study in the Bay Area. I was leaving familiar territory and heading into an unfamiliar and unknown world. I was saying goodbye to the people I had grown up with or to those who had watched me grow up. All my memories and emotions were attached to it. These were people who I thought really knew me and understood me. Yet each of them had their own impression of how I should feel. Excitement, joy, fear and sadness are the most popular. But no one really knew how I felt. I felt all of these emotions melt into a unique emotion of my own. A situation that I couldn't share, even with my best friend. When I expressed my fears and anxiety about leaving Kentucky, no one really seemed to listen to what I was saying. They kept saying everything would be fine. I was mature and almost adult and the Western world, with its great material temptations, did not want to corrupt me. But in my mind, I felt isolated. I wanted them to sit and feel my anguish with me. But they wanted to soothe me, to console me as if I were a baby. At that time I felt......middle of paper......e or friendship. We are taught that we have no identity if we are alone. This is why we treat loneliness as a disease that must be avoided at all costs. Loneliness is considered a deficiency in our personality. Although we are all taught to be independent, our independence is superficial. We can cook, clean, and do our laundry, but we can't manage our emotions independently. We are taught that we must share all our emotions. And I believe that no matter how hard we look, we will never achieve the kind of understanding we seek. We are taught to be uncomfortable in our own world. Society conditions us to believe that we are not equipped enough to be alone and content. And that alone always means feeling alone. Works Cited Macdonald, Elizabeth. “Odalisque” Encounters (Edt. Pat C. Hoy, Robert DiYanni) The McG.Graw-Hill Companies, Inc.