I’m too old for this world. I’m not built for it. I travel around it wishing I had some kind of road map that would make navigation easier. Instead, I just bump into things along the way.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I just have an old soul and it makes me feel like I don’t fit in most places and people don’t “get me” and it feels very lonely on days when is gets to be a bit much. These are the days when I don’t leave the house and stay home to read books and listen to Chopin and play my violin, not because I’m an intellectual snob (which, let’s be real, I am) but those days the world just seems too “people-y.” It’s why I turn down your invitations. I just need space and quiet.

This old soul feels stuck in a society that puts way too much value on youth and doing whatever we can to hold on to it. I’m far more traditional than most people I run into. I do things most people don’t do and crave conversations most people don’t want to have. One of the most joyful things I did last week was to sit and have a conversation about the Federalist Papers with a man well into his seventies. These moments are too far and too few in between.

We’ve lost our moral compass as a whole. We drink too much and lie too often. We cheat and cover up. We lack courage and emotional strength. We work to get ours and screw the rest. We name call and we back stab. We work too much and brag too often. Our character has been pummeled into the ground.

Communication is a lost art. I like to write letters. I own stationery so I can physically send something off to someone that isn’t followed by a WHOOSH sound or responded to with six words announced with a dinging alert tone. It’s an investment of time of mine I allot to those that deserve it. And it makes me happy. I want to have company that comes by the house so I can make a pot of coffee too late at night and sit and visit and eat cake. Like my mom did. Sit and talk. Right there in that moment. I want a candidate to ring my doorbell, not have a staffer send me a text. I want engagement.

Dating is about the most excrutiating and soul crushing thing I have done in a long time. Online dating is a farce but you can’t meet people out in the real world because no one talks to each other anymore and everyone is just looking at their phones. People create profiles and personas and it’s a sales pitch and not even a good one. Conversations are empty and trust is hard to come by. We’ve resorted to swiping through pictures like we’re picking out a couch. And you can only imagine how I don’t translate well in 250 or so characters. It just comes out weird.

I also refuse to have sex with someone I don’t care about. I get no enjoyment out of it. In a world of instant gratification, the idea seems archaic. In a land of hookups and flings, I feel like the odd man out and yet I’m perfectly happy to go home alone. Every single time. But people who see me as an attractive, freshly divorced woman don’t understand why I just can’t embrace the idea of going out and finding myself a “boy toy” to just have fun with. It isn’t fun for me.

Relationships, whether they be romantic or work related or familial become a series of disengagements and disconnection. It’s a struggle and a set of games like you’re doing nothing more than playing emotional chess until someone is declared the winner because their king is left standing, the winning strategy is to knock the queen to the ground.

I don’t understand people and it makes me tired and cranky. I see hatred and judgment and animosity more times than I want to. I don’t value these things. I don’t think it makes people interesting or experienced or wise. It makes them assholes. I can’t wrap my brain around a soulless society where we’ve removed beauty from everything. I’m getting bitter and I’m getting jaded and I don’t like it. But, every day I struggle and I fight to find that beauty and it shouldn’t be this hard but it feels like trying to find a needle in the haystack most days. And I’m just tired. So damn tired.

Thoreau wrote that he wanted “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” I think I need to do that too. A little transcendental purging. My old soul needs it. It needs to be fed. I don’t care if it makes me weird. Let me be weird.