The Ache That Pulls Both Ways On Wanting to Be Alone and Wanting to Be Known There is a kind of loneliness that does not come from the absence of people, but from the presence of an unhealed structure. It is not episodic. It does not announce itself as despair. It is simply there—a baseline condition, like gravity. This essay is an attempt to explain why a person can simultaneously crave solitude and ache for companionship, and why this tension is not a contradiction, pathology, or moral failure, but a predictable consequence of early relational trauma. ...