I’ve been meaning to write about loneliness for a long time, but I don’t usually like tackling topics that are too close to pop psychology. My intention with these essays is not to provide solutions or definitive answers to anyone. I like processing my OWN thoughts and experiences, and use this space to feel more connected to others that maybe see themselves in these thoughts and experiences.
My decision to finally write about loneliness came from a brief DM exchange with a friend who also happens to be a therapist. I told them about how unqualified I felt to write essays like this, and in return, I got asked a question:
Why do I feel like I need to be an expert to write about something I’ve experienced?
I had two reasons:
- I might be taken too seriously. That’s not good because I’m not a licensed mental health professional, and I don’t want people taking my ‘experiences’ as advice without context. Bad.
- I might not be taken seriously at all. Like I imagined actual smart mental health professionals reading this and being like, ‘Who is this idiot’ and sending screenshots to each other on WhatsApp. Very bad.
So, all this to say, there is a seriousness sweet spot that I’m aiming at here, and I’m hoping I nail it, otherwise, I’ll just die I guess.
Today I’m discussing loneliness and being alone and how that can look and feel depending on the season you’re in. The experience I’m drawing from is of moving to a new place as an adult.
To help you get the mostest out of this essay, here are a few definitions. Stop whatever else you’re doing and memorize them right now!!!!
Alone
What does alone even mean anymore? Genuinely asking. If you’re by yourself but texting someone the whole time, are you alone?
If you’re by yourself but there’s a podcast on in the background, are you alone? I don’t fully know. I used to think alone just meant nobody else is in the room. But you can have a whole room to yourself, and still not get one second with your actual thoughts.
So for the sake of this article, you’re alone when it’s just you AND you can hear yourself think. Everything else is just being on your phone by yourself.
Solitude
Solitude is being alone + being content with it.
Or being alone and not feeling lonely.
The difference is you picked it. Nobody left you alone against your will, you closed the door yourself and you’re glad it’s shut.
Aristotle reckoned the best things we do (thinking, making stuff, working an idea out) should happen in solitude, away from everyone else’s noise. Which, sure, fair. But have you actually tried sitting alone with your own thoughts lately? Like properly, no phone? It’s so much harder than he makes it sound. More on that in a bit.
Isolation
Being alone and sad about it.
Same as solitude, except you didn’t choose it. Nobody actually wants to feel isolated. But the good news is it doesn’t have to stay that way. Isolation can shift into solitude with a bit of time.
You can go from being sad about being alone to being content. And it can slide back the other way too where you’re all happy in your solitude and then realize hey I feel isolated.
Loneliness
Okay now what does being lonely mean in all of this? I looked up what Aristotle had to say and that was no help so I’m bringing in a more current thinker. Meet Akon.
I think he’s an expert on loneliness for two reasons:
- He wrote the hit song ‘Lonely’ in 2005 that became the whiny anthem of the year.
- Secondly, he spent years and apparently $6 billion trying to build his own city in Senegal, called…. Akon City. It was meant to be (in his words) a futuristic real life Wakanda smart city type of thing. And as of last year, there’s basically nothing there. An empty plot and one reception building. So he’s a guy who tried to build a whole city that nobody ended up living in. He knows something about loneliness is all I’m saying.
But if loneliness is a part of isolation, then it must also be a product of our internal world. Loneliness isn’t dependent on our surroundings, environment, or the people in our lives. It’s largely unrelated to what’s going on outside us.
Meaning Akon could have possibly been lonely even with his girl by his side, and yet, one can’t help but feel like she could have left a note or something.
Living the dream, but not the fantasy
This section is about isolation.
I moved to Goa three-ish (WOW) years ago from Bombay. My husband and I both work tech-based remote jobs. We run a cute little cafe and an Airbnb. We live in a nice apartment that’s walking distance from the beach.
I like describing my life that way because it sounds soooo enviable. But I also like popping the myths about this romanticized version of my life. It comes with many tradeoffs. For example, the career limitations of working remotely, the challenges of finding like-minded friends, the sadness of leaving behind your old friends.
But the most profound aspect of this move for me has been confronting a very real loneliness. The kind that has nothing to do with how amazing your marriage might be.
In my first year of life here, I’d walk past busy restaurants and bars, looking in at scenes that used to be my life in the city, but felt painfully out of reach for me now. I’d see friends engrossed in loud, animated conversations. 90s pop songs playing in the background. I’d overhear plans to go swimming the next day, and I’d watch people piling into a car as they argued about where to go next.
And I’d walk past these sounds and sights, ouch-ily aware of the fact that my husband and I would probably be having a quiet dinner at home. While I adore his company, these evenings didn’t look anything like the life we were both used to in the city.
More importantly, they didn’t look like the life I wanted others to think I was having.
If loneliness really does come from the inside and isn’t necessarily dependent on circumstances, then my loneliness wasn’t because I was short on friends or plans. It was about comparison. I was constantly measuring my life against everyone else’s and wanting what they had. I could’ve made more effort and more plans. I just didn’t, and then felt bad watching other people make them.
What I wanted was the fantasy. Girl moves to Goa, girl has the dream life, girl is always at the thing. When my actual days didn’t match that highlight reel, I felt lonely. I’d watch groups of people doing the exact stuff everyone else assumed I was doing all the time.
It made me wonder if I was wasting the one precious season that I would NEVER get back on doing chores and making dinner and watching another episode of something I’d already seen. Or on work. Mostly, mostly work. Everyone else seemed to be out living, and I was watching them do it. Which felt, as Akon puts it, lonely.
The good news is that this brand of loneliness, which is surface-level and a tad pointless, can be fixed. It’s a combination of FOMO, YOLO, and immaturity. It’s just the result of looking in the wrong direction. While you’re catching a glimpse at everyone else’s life, the choices you make can feel a little isolating.
The antidote is simply to shift your gaze to the life that’s in front of you, and you’ll soon realize that parts of it aren’t all that bad.
Sweet and sour
This section is about solitude.
As per our earlier definition, solitude is being alone and being content with it. Unlike Sonia circa 2020, I now treasure every moment of solitude I have. They don’t come by easily or often as a new mother, and they’re perhaps the one thing I miss most about my life before having a baby.
But the one thing I’ve realized about solitude is that I’m inherently bad at it. Like super crappy at it. I long for free time, but when it finally comes, I fill it up all over again. And on the rare occasion that I don’t busy-up my solitude, I spend that time reaching for my phone and scrolling or watching the same familiar TV show that I’ve watched five times.
This is why I think solitude is a skill, which means you can work at being good at it. You can learn how to sit with your thoughts and use these opportunities to check in with yourself and notice how you’re actually doing.
I’m not anti-scrolling. I’m not anti rotting in front of the TV. But when I spend my rare free time on autopilot, I sometimes come out more tired than I went in, which is the opposite of what rest is supposed to do.
So I’ve worked out the conditions I need for alone time to actually help me instead of making me feel worse. Here’s my four-point checklist for relaxing:
- Being alone has to be by choice. If you go to a library and pick up a book to read, you generally look forward to reading it. If you’re in college and you’re forced to read a book, it feels like a chore. The same thing applies to being alone. It’s better when it isn’t forced on you.
- I have to be in a decent headspace to start with. If I’m already low, being alone doesn’t fix it. It just gives me more room to spiral into feeling lonely or bored or restless.
- The option of hanging out with people has to be close enough to be accessible. I might not always want to go, but it’s nice to know that I can change my mind.
- And finally, I need to have positive relationships around me that support my occasional bout of solitude and don’t make me feel guilty about it.
I know these sound selfish but in reality, I think everyone would like a version of this. Learning to grow up probably means being okay with not having these criteria met and handling your loneliness.
In my experience with feeling alone, I would usually forget that everything I experienced was a product of my own choices. I made the decision to uproot my life, and move. I’ve made decisions about the sort of company I’d like to keep. I’ve often held firmly to my comfort zone. I sometimes made the decision to avoid plans.
Today, I like to remind myself of what a luxury it is to have the freedom to choose to be alone or to be in company. If I made this, I can un-make it. If the loneliness is mostly coming from my own choices, then I have WAY more say over it than I was giving myself credit for. It makes taking responsibility for the outcome of my choices much easier.
As Charles Bukowski wrote, “When nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
I have nobody to call my own. I’m so lonely.
This section is about loneliness.
And if you thought I was done with my Akon analogy, you are sorely mistaken because he taught us that loneliness isn’t just a lack of company. It’s the lack of a specific type of company.
For Akon, it was the lack of his girl (or maybe, any girl?) right by his side. His loneliness had almost nothing to do with how many people were around, it’s about whether the ones you actually wanted were there.
And sometimes, same bro. I don’t want just any connection, I wanted a specific type of connection. I felt lonely for something in particular. I wanted my old, familiar group of friends to plug and play in this new chapter of my life. I wanted people who’d seen me through life. It took me most of my twenties to build the friendships I had back home.
I wanted to skip all of the work, all the time spent hanging out, talking, learning, and living. I felt like the fact that I’d already done all that, and then left it, was sad. Like maybe I was hasty and foolish to leave. Starting over, however you do it, is hard.
One day, I found myself in a slump of loneliness coupled with an itch to overshare, and I met with a friend to complain that I had nobody to hang out with or talk to. They empathized and let me whine for a bit. It felt great. The silliness of what was happening wasn’t lost on me, I’d just reached out to someone to talk about how I felt like I had no one to reach out to.
And that’s almost always the case. Even when I do have people, I’m just afraid to initiate contact. It’s easier to whine about the fact that I have nobody than it is to face my fears of building new relationships.
I decided that day that I never actually wanted to experience that nobody-to-call feeling, so I made a list of people I DID have as a reminder to myself. It was, unsurprisingly, a fairly long list of family and friends that I loved dearly. Whenever I feel like I have nobody, I look at that list and feel better. Sometimes I even put in the work and message them.
There some amount of shame in saying you’re lonely, or even just alone and fine with it. You end up reassuring everyone you’re okay, you’re happy, you’re still worthy. I wish this whole thing didn’t have to be that sticky. Maybe one day it won’t be, for me at least.
Wrapping up
This section is about wrapping up.
Today, three-ish (WOW) years later, my life has changed dramatically. I’m no longer the city girl in a new town. I feel like belong here. I’ve weathered the loneliness and turned some of it into growth (and some of it into garbage but heyyyy).
It’s not that I’ve stopped feeling alone or lonely. I still do, often. I just understand these situations better. Some weekends I just spend time at home, and I’m extremely grateful for it. Sometimes I get antsy comparing my life to everyone else’s, and I’ve learned to talk myself off that ledge.
Sometimes, I genuinely miss specific people, where the only thing that works is talking to them and letting them know. And that’s it, I try not to make it more complicated than that.
I’ll leave you with an image that helped me process loneliness when I was young. It’s from a book called “Letters to a Young Poet” written by a German-Austrian poet named Rainer Maria Rilke to a 19-year-old aspiring poet. I was 19 when I first read it, and I liked to pretend that the letters were written to me.
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
As a Christian, I was familiar with the notion of an all-encompassing love that I could rely on being stored up for me like an inheritance. But this excerpt gave me a picture of a big net cast by the real people in my life that cared for me. The net extended far and wide across timezones and latitudes and seasons and circumstances. I could feel the proximity of those that loved me, and I could draw from their affection whenever I wanted.
Although personal growth can feel like a solitary exercise, whenever I feel lonely, I picture that large net of love laid out by the people that have my back, and I’m just there chilling in it.
I remind myself that I can “travel as far as I wish without having to step outside it.” It’s a happy picture. It’s also cheesy as heck, but Akon literally called himself Mr. Lonely in a song and tried to build Akon City, so don’t even TRY to tell me that isn’t way more cringe.
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