Call me a cynic, or call me a naysayer, but when the holidays come around I can’t help but turn my thoughts to the theme of isolation. 

(Of course, it doesn’t help when I flickr through fellow photos of Iceland and come across pictures that express this very theme.) 

Being alone versus being lonely, then: two are close in physical manifestation, but so different in weight.
 
When I’m lonely, I’m desperate. When I’m alone, I’m empowered. Loneliness and his compatriot, rejection, flirt in the corner of your idle room and thoughts stray into what feels like an ocean without people. 

Aloneness, though, the simple negative presence of social contact, is the cool brooding artist in the corner café inspiring thoughts for his next great creation. Friends need not apply.
 
When you spend the holidays in a country foreign to your own, do these feelings not expound? I’m surrounded by the happy Christmas wishes of my Icelandic companions, but in a time when ritual and tradition are primary, the hard truth is these rituals and traditions do not yet belong to me. I am alone in my newness to them. But am I lonely?
 
I’m on the fence. And I don’t mind being on the fence about this because I believe loneliness to be a necessary step in finding or renewing oneself. But when your independence goes from empowering to boring, I just wish I could move the fence around a bit. 
 
And even if it is your native customs and your childhood home, half of the holiday season is about rediscovering that even in these most comfortable circumstances, loneliness is not a stranger.

Haven’t we learned from the endless string of American movies about families coming home for Christmas that it is often a rather painful experience, reminding us of all those unwanted childhood memories and strained relationships that we’re able to ignore for the rest of the year?  

Having to watch an admired relative age ungracefully, forced to listen to your sibling’s annoying new girlfriend, bored of counting the numberless snowflakes outside your window, feeling guilty for wanting to watch Lost instead of spending more time with your parents. The feelings are universal and yet so isolating. 
 
This year in my anti-loneliness prayers, I’ve had to perform the careful Christmas invitation dance. Not to seem too keen, nor impolite. I got some my Christmas dinner invitations months before, and thinking in my aloned empowerment I would get more in the future, I rejected them. 

Of course, having received the invitation once, no new ones came because the assumption was I had accepted the first to be served. The dance turned from a pas de deux to a pasadoble and in the end I am the defeated, invitation-less dancer.
 
But pity I do not seek, readership. I have evolved into an American alone (chime in themes of imperialism and cowboys riding off in the horizon), on the craggy Icelandic landscape that does not exactly comfort one when feeling lonely. 

But it’s moments like this that remind us we need to change our pace from that slothy, depressive animal we call loneliness to the fit, but wild stallion we call independence. 
 
It’s easy to be lonely on an island where the rest of the world seems so far away, where you drive 40 minutes outside the most populated city and any sign of human contact has disappeared; where entire pieces of literature explore this theme (Independent People, anyone?). 

For precisely this reason, I think Icelanders have a skin thicker for loneliness that I can only admire. Their isolation is more of the color aloneness. The example Icelanders I’ve seen go against their landscape and, seriously, don’t let it get them down, kids. 

If there’s a country in which to kick the lonely, then, why not this one where people have been seemingly doing it successfully?
 
Whether you’re alone this Christmas, or have your hundredfold family around you, this independista wishes you a very Merry Christmas. 

Aina Fuller – ainafuller@gmail.com