There is a subtle dichotomy between people who are alone: there are those who are alone by choice and those who are forced into loneliness. Because loneliness is an entirely inward experience, this distinction is up to the lonely individual to define for themselves. However, it is difficult for anyone to tell whether they prefer loneliness or if loneliness is something that prefers them. How does someone decide, in the empty chamber of their own mind, whether their loneliness is a hole they have dug for themselves, or whether it is a hole dug by others in which they have become trapped? And does this distinction matter at all if a life is to be a lonely one regardless?

Those who prefer to be alone may find comfort in their own predictability and mistrust the chaotic unknown of the other. Alternatively, they may prefer to be alone simply due to prolonged practice and steady acclimation. Loneliness could be devouring them piece by piece but this pain may be as irksome to them as a fly is to a cow, or they may attribute the pain to something else entirely; either outside or within. And the quest to cure what they misattribute the grinding pain of loneliness to will keep them occupied until their death.

Those who feel trapped in loneliness may be just as acclimated to it as those who choose it, but the wounds torn into them are deeper and more numerous, leaving more of them exposed. Under harsh sunlight their bones will bleach and in the path of icy winds their lungs will freeze solid. The most they can hope for is to learn to endure the pain, because it will always pass, and they will slip once more into the craggy greyness of an acclimated discomfort. They spend their lives in knots, knowing the source of their suffering but being unable to detangle themselves from it.

In contrast to the mutable and inward experience of the lonely, the perception any individual outsider has of the lonely person is static. The experiences of a lonely individual can have no bearing on the outsiders' perception of them simply because the barrier of loneliness is all that an outsider can observe. And so the outsider may see a pitiable, cowering creature, or a stoic figure to be pedastled, or a sneering and despicable misanthrope. And this perception belies the outsider's conceptualization of loneliness: as something to fear, something to admire, or something to scorn.