Thank you for your honest and straight-forward reply. I was suicidal for a time, which was probably just a natural progression of my excessive pondering and heavy into the Existentialists with an Irish Catholic foundation. Confusing. 

Ecclesiates was my favorite book...after Catcher In The Rye. 

I could never allow myself to honor the strong pull to solitude; it remained a somewhat cowardly isolation, a retreat from life and not where life gained insight and meaning. It was seen as a deficiency, a failing. What did not help was that my family of origin and my whole extended family were extroverts and very good at it. I was literally painfully shy.

Your piece helped move me a bit further along to accepting my propensity for solitude; it has been a long struggle.