Kristen Radtke

"When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody--anybody--who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into [an] ... exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another"--

A Journey Through American Loneliness

Seek You

Stas

Loneliness isn't necessarily tied to whether you have a partner or a best friend or an aspirationally active social life in which you're laughing all the time. It's a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationship you want. Loneliness lives in the gap. 

Human children know well that a simple way to gain access to a group is by tormenting someone apart from it. The weakness of an outsider is repulsive to someone desperate to stay inside.

I'm really enjoying the political commentary in this, because instead of just going "boooo they're bad" it's giving an explanation to why people can end up in such ways. It's also so well done through the art, it's a great reading experience. 

If loneliness can cause us to lose sense of what is real, how do we function within a country that is constantly telling us what we trust and know cannot be trusted or known.

[...] it seems to me quite possible that we have always been a very lonely people.

It's hard not to imagine now that my mother was mourning herself, too, when she cried for Diana. Though their lives held nothing visibly in common, Diana spoke freely about a loneliness I couldn't see then but that my mother surely felt as a woman who spent nearly all her time alone in a house with small children. 

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