There is a loneliness that belongs only to the self-taught, and almost no one warns you about it. It is not the loneliness of having no one around. It is the loneliness of understanding something and having no one to understand it with.
You read a passage that opens a door in you, and the door opens onto an empty room. There is no one to turn to and say, did you feel that. So you close the door quietly and move on, and a little of the light is lost because no one shared it.
The self-taught learner is the only one in the room who never gets to be wrong out loud.
What you have been doing without
The self-taught learner is the only one in the room who never gets to be wrong out loud. Every error you make, you correct in silence, and so you never feel the strange relief of saying something foolish to a friend and being gently set right.
You also never hear yourself explain. And explaining to another person is one of the oldest ways understanding becomes real — you do not fully know a thing until you have tried to give it away. The tradition treasures the teacher and the partner partly for this: learning becomes solid only when it passes between two people.
So the loneliness you feel is not a character flaw or a lack of stamina. It is the simple absence of the second person that learning was built to include.
Naming it so you can leave it
I name this loneliness not to deepen it but to help you walk out of it. What you cannot name, you tend to mistake for a permanent fact about yourself. It is not. It is a stage, and stages are meant to be passed through.
The cure is almost embarrassingly direct. One other person. One partner who will be wrong out loud beside you, who will hear you explain, who will share the light when a door opens.
We can help you understand what has been missing. The person who fills it is not on any screen. Go toward a real teacher, a real partner, a real table — and let the empty room finally have someone else in it.