Unlonely. Unbothered. Unbored.

I remember the first time I felt it.

Not sadness exactly. Something heavier. A dark cloud that didn’t hover above me, it moved inside me. Into my chest. Into my limbs. I woke up one morning and my body felt like it was made of something ancient and dense, like it had been carrying a weight for a thousand years without my permission.

I remember lying there thinking, is this what depression feels like?

And in that stillness, something unexpected happened. I didn’t panic. I didn’t reach for my phone or a distraction or a reason. I just got quiet with it. I sat in it the way you sit with a guest you didn’t invite but who showed up anyway, respected, curious, unhurried. I let it be what it was. And a couple of days later, I woke up and it was just gone.

Just like that.

I tell you that story first because I want you to know I am not speaking from some elevated place where life’s weather doesn’t reach me. That thing snatched me up and got me. It came without a reason, without a loss, without a warning. My body had its own weather that day, and I had nothing to do with making it arrive or leave. What is biological and physiological is real, and I will never minimize that for anyone. If you live inside a storm that doesn’t lift with willpower or perspective, please know that I see you. I honor that. And I am not talking to that part of your story today.

But I am talking to something else.

Recently, I had a beautiful conversation with someone who told me they had spent most of their life running. Not from a place or a person, but from a feeling. Loneliness. They described it as this low hum that followed them everywhere, this ache that would surface anytime the noise around them got quiet enough to hear it. So they kept the noise up. Always moving. Always filling. Never quite still.

I honored everything they shared. And then after we hung up, something settled in me.

I have never felt lonely.

Not once. Not the way they described it.

And I didn’t say that to them, because that conversation wasn’t about me. But I stayed with that awareness for a while, turning it over like a stone, wondering what it meant and where it came from. And then a few days later, a friend mentioned wanting to get out of the house because they were so bored they could barely stand being in their own skin. We laughed about it. But something in me stayed with that too.

Unlonely. Unbothered. Unbored.

Three words that just seemed to quietly describe my interior life. And I found myself asking: why? What is it in my particular living that has kept those three energies from taking root?

And the first thing I wanted to say, clearly and without apology, is this:

I am not special.

I have no superpowers. I haven’t spent twenty years in a monastery. I have not reached some exalted state of consciousness where the messy, painful, complicated texture of life no longer grazes me. That is not what this is. And I say that because I think what I’m about to share has always been available. Not to a chosen few. To all of us. It just got buried. Under urgency. Under wounds. Under a world that never taught us how to be at home in ourselves.

If I am being honest, I think it starts here: I am probably my own favorite company.

I know that might sound strange, or even a little lonely to some. But solitude, for me, has never been empty. When I get quiet, I travel. I create. I play. I have had a big imagination since I was a little kid, and it never stopped working. I can imagine myself rich, I can imagine myself on a coastline somewhere, I can imagine a version of a conversation that went differently and explore what that might have felt like. Life, inside my mind, is genuinely limitless. There is so much happening in there that the silence outside never feels like absence. It feels like permission.

But I think what deepened all of that, what gave it roots and not just wings, was studying spiritual direction.

Because spiritual direction is not about doctrine. It is about the deeply relational nature of being human. And one of the things it gave me early on is this understanding: we are in relationship with everything. Not just the people we love. Everything.

If I am sitting in my backyard, I am in relationship with the dirt. With the air. With the trees leaning slightly toward the sun. With the wind moving through the leaves like it has something to say. I am never alone in the way the modern world has defined alone, because I understand myself to be in constant communion. With life. With what is alive. With what has always been alive, long before I arrived.

And then there is the other thing. The thing I carry with me from the rooms where I held space for people whose bodies were no longer cooperating with their desire to stay.

Chaplaincy taught me something I will never be able to fully put into words. But I will try.

When people know that their time is measured, something shifts. The small tyrannies of the mind, the endless loop of grievances and regrets and comparisons and worries, they lose their grip. Not always. Not for everyone. But for many of the people I sat with, there was this arrival. Into the present. Into the exact moment they were in. And from inside that arrival, loneliness and boredom and agitation simply could not find purchase. There was not enough room. Life, all of it, the light through the window, the warmth of a hand, the sound of someone breathing nearby, became so luminous and so sufficient that nothing was missing.

They showed me what it looks like when the volume gets turned all the way up.

And that is the image I keep coming back to.

A volume knob.

Boredom, I think, is what happens when the knob is stuck at zero. Or below zero. When you are looking at red and seeing gray. When you are tasting something spiced and layered and rich and your tongue registers nothing. Not because the color isn’t vibrant. Not because the food isn’t good. But because something in the way you are interpreting the moment cannot access its aliveness. Cannot feel the current running through it.

Loneliness, I think, is a version of the same. It is what happens when the self is not enough company for itself, when we have never been taught to be in relationship with our own interior life, and so the quiet feels like abandonment rather than invitation.

And this is where I want to be careful, because I am not saying this is your fault. I am not saying you simply need to try harder or want it more. What I am saying is that the world most of us inherited never gave us the tools to turn the knob up ourselves. We were handed noise instead. We were handed productivity and consumption and the approval of others as substitutes for the intimacy of our own presence.

There is a film I think about sometimes, Walkabout, about an Aboriginal young man going alone into the landscape as a rite of passage. Not as punishment. As initiation. As an understanding that you cannot be an asset to community until you have become a home to yourself.

So many of the traditions that colonization interrupted understood this. Across the African continent. Across indigenous communities. Across the ancient world. The time alone, the silence, the initiation, the rite of passage, was never cruelty. It was instruction. It was the culture saying: you cannot pour from a self you do not know. You cannot love what you cannot sit with.

And when that thread gets cut, as it has for so many of us, what rushes in is the wound. The attachment hunger. The need for others to fill what we were never taught to tend in ourselves. Others become the noise we need. Others become what moves us because we have forgotten what it feels like to be moved from the inside.

So what do we do with this?

I don’t think we go live in the woods. I don’t think we disappear. I think we begin, slowly and with tremendous gentleness, to practice being present to what is already here.

Your breath. Right now. The weight of your own body in the seat you are sitting in. The quality of the light wherever you are reading this. The particular texture of this moment, which will never come again.

None of this requires training you don’t have. It requires willingness. It requires the smallest possible turning of the knob. Just enough to let a little more in.

You were not born bored. You were not born unable to be with yourself. You were born into a world that had already forgotten how to teach you what your ancestors knew: that the self is not an inconvenience to be managed or a silence to be filled.

It is the original home. And home, beloved, is always available to you.

Doc Rain is a doctoral-level clinician, theologian, educator, ordained minister, and chaplain. They write and heal at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, decolonization, and the sacred work of returning to self. Nativ Elementz is their living ecosystem. You are welcome here.