I am not a mind reader.

Loneliness. Is it worse to be lonely in a crowd or lonely all by yourself? I posed that to my friends on facebook and got a myriad of answers...all different...all valid. Even my own answer might have changed a little bit since I posed it.

There is a moment...a moment when you want desperately to connect with someone and despite your efforts, they just don't connect with you the way you had hoped. You see, I am not a mind reader. Despite my ideas to the contrary, I don't really know what anyone else is thinking. They might be sad or mad or annoyed or just a little distracted. But I imagine their motives, and I get hurt or sad or just wish for depth that wasn't there. A few of these moments in a given week add up for me.

Loneliness.

It's that time between being with people who I didn't connect with to the depth that I desired and being able to do another task that I think is the loneliest. I just came from the crowd or even just one or two people...and I might be alone...but it's that space of disconnect that overwhelms me. It's a feeling of abandonment, of rejection, of insignificance.

But as I mentioned earlier, I'm not a mind-reader. I am not always good at reading people; I'm insecure often, and together that spells disaster and a loneliness that just may be all in my head. Or my heart.