I’m going to break my own rule this week. Those who know me, know that I am “all about the good stuff”. I genuinely believe that we make this world better by focussing on what is already beautiful, on old wisdom and new insights, and by giving as little energy as possible to the things and/or people that drag us down.
That is who I am and that is the work I do.
But you know what? I am also human, and my life is as much of an emotional switchback as anyone else’s, so this week I am going to step a bit further into my honesty and talk about feeling lonely. Because I have been. Feeling lonely, that is. I want to be clear about those words at the outset. It matters that we get this straight, not least because it’s true, but more so because it helps.
Lonely is not something we ARE; it is something that we FEEL.
But when we feel it, it can be overwhelming. Before I go further, I need to be clear that this is not a call for help, not a plea for sympathy. I am writing this from being (pretty much) on the other side of the feeling. I am back on dry land and reconnecting. It isn’t a switch that can be flicked…it’s more like re-lighting the fire with damp tinder. But I’ve got the embers catching. I am getting there.
I am writing this to acknowledge that (thankfully) my experiences of feeling this way are infrequent and generally short-lived. But they ARE part of who I am. Experiences of feeling lonely are part of who every single one of us is, and we need to get better about talking about it.
I am still rubbish at admitting when I feel lonely. I will call it any manner of other things before I use the L-word. And that’s easy to do because research shows that loneliness actually manifests in behaviours associated with all those other things: anger, depression, tiredness, irritability, substance abuse, violence – and worse.
If I was still in the middle of the feeling, I would not be able to write this. I am also willing to admit that I began writing it as part of my climb-back. Writing and sharing is my work. Even having written it, I have sat with it deliberating whether I am brave enough to post it. And then sat some more to wonder why I should think there is anything “brave” about doing so.
If you want to dig deeper into definitions of loneliness, what it is and is not, and how it differs from more physical world descriptors like isolation, I recommend tuning into Brené Brown’s podcast from April 2020 talking to Dr. Vivek Murthy. I’d suggest you do this when you’re feeling curious rather than when you’re actually feeling lonely, because as useful as it is…it does contain some hard truths.
So for me, feeling lonely is hard. Talking about feeling lonely isn’t just hard, it’s well-nigh impossible. I have a few close friends who know pretty much everything there is to know about
me, all my deep dark transgressions against the rules of being a kind, loving, beautiful, perfect human being. But coming right out and saying I feel really lonely right now, is not something I can do. Literally, I physically cannot do it. I go into meltdown.
Writing this piece is not easy but speaking the truth out loud? Let me tell you I am nowhere near ready to do that. And here’s why – it’s a point Brené makes in the podcast – there is still a measure of shame around feeling lonely.
We have progressed SO FAR on talking about mental health, which is brilliant, but we still have a way to go. It is now ok to admit that you are depressed or struggling with addiction or self-harm or have anger-management challenges. It is still ‘not ok’ (as in not easy, as in still shame-laden) to say I feel lonely.
When I journalled around how I was feeling a few days ago, I actually wrote I am ashamed…but I attached that shame to other things about myself that are not perfect. Even in the privacy of my own Morning Pages, it was really hard to put that label where it belonged. Here’s a blatant truth: I felt lonely, and I was ashamed of feeling that way.
Dr Murthy & Brené (she’s my hero, and therefore a friend, therefore I get to call her by her first name even though I’ve never met her) put this into context for me. We are ashamed to admit feeling lonely because we think it means not just that we are unloved, but that we are unlovable. We think there is something wrong with us.
That is fundamentally untrue. If you are a functioning human being reading (or indeed writing! Note to self) this, then by definition you are lovable, because by definition there is someone who loves you or has loved you, and therefore by definition there is certainly someone you haven’t met yet who will also love you. Love, like and/or respect. They are all laden words, and self-defined words, but they all go to the heart of what matters in terms of feeling lonely and this is simply ‘deep connection’.
Dr. Murthy talks about three kinds of connection: intimate, social and community.
Intimate doesn’t necessarily mean a spouse or life partner, but it does mean a close confidante, someone “with whom you share a deep mutual bond of affection and trust” – a no-holds barred relationship.
Social is about quality friendships: these are the people you might not feel the need to share absolutely every detail of your inner life with, but who would be there for you and who you would be there for, no questions asked. They are the people who totally ‘get’ you – and love, like & respect you anyway.
Community is a wider group of people who “share your sense of purpose and interests”. In the modern world our community is not necessarily the local folk we live amongst, though that would be brilliant, it is what some have identified as ‘our tribe’ no matter where they live.
We are a social species, and as much as we might often tell ourselves otherwise, the truth is we need all three kinds of connection.
Another truth is that each and every connection is only deep if within it we are truly our honest self. As soon as we break trust with our self, every other connection starts to crumble. We do not have to share all of that self in the wider connections. Indeed, it is safer not to do so, but what we do choose to share must be totally aligned with who we really are. We cannot connect in unauthenticity.
The fourth (or really the first) kind of connection, then, is with our own self. Who we are, who we want to be, our own values and purpose.
The problem is that when we’re feeling lonely, we may not know which kind of connection we are missing. Or we may know that but might not know what to do about filling that gap. Indeed, there may not be anything we can do about filling the gap, especially in the short term. Forging connection is not easy. What we can do, in the short term, is acknowledge the gap and then ramp up our openness to the ways in which we are connected. Be open to and acknowledge the love that is already in our lives.
I’m getting better at acknowledging precisely how I feel, at least to myself. Further credit to Brené for this: check out her book ‘Atlas of the Heart’ on the importance of having the vocabulary to narrow down our emotions. I started out feeling ‘rotten’ and ‘angry’ and ‘tired’ and ‘depressed’. It took a while to figure out that what I was really feeling was an absence of connection. (See,I’m still using euphemism, shying away from the L-word.) I was feeling lonely.
Dr Murthy defines loneliness as a gap between the kinds of connection we want and those that we have. I think that sometimes it isn’t that we don’t have that connection, it’s just that in the moment (for a time) we are on the ‘down’ end of it.
Connection, to my mind is all about flow. Giving and receiving. In relationship with other people, we do this all the time. We give and we receive. We help and are helped. We support and are supported. The problem can be that this is flow not balance.
Think of the Yinyang symbol. You will see that, overall, it is in balance, but only because it is frozen in a moment of time. At every point along that intersecting line between yin and yang, other that the tiniest infinitesimal mid-point, there is imbalance. What we think of as balance relies on flow, not stasis.
A static balance is impossible to achieve, especially in relationship. This is important to accept, because it means that there are times when the person or people or community we are in relationship with will be somewhere near the middle of that circle, roughly equal in the giving / receiving, but there will also be times when we are out near the edge where our portion of the circle is virtually non-existent, or at the other extreme where we are carrying the whole weight of
it. We feel either like we are invisible or that we are unsupported. Ignored or overwhelmed. Either of those are very lonely places to be.
It is either a feeling of if I wasn’t here no-one would notice or a feeling of they need me here but are ignoring that I also have needs. It is about not feeling that we are seen.
Let me underline the order of those last few words. It is not feeling that we are seen.
That is subtly different from: feeling that we are not seen.
It is much more subjective, in the sense we might know intellectually that we are loved and valued and all the rest of it; we’re just not feeling it. And that is about our own internal world, much more than it is about what’s going on outside of us.
It isn’t about isolation. In fact, isolation is my first response to feeling lonely. Just go away and leave me alone! I don’t say it, but it is how I feel. I can’t do this. I cannot talk to you about this. There is nothing you can do to help me with this. And in a way that is true. These people who I know love me, can’t help me when I’m in that place, because they are already loving me the best way they know how. These are things that I need to talk to them about, but not when I’m in the depth of the
darkness. When I’m down there, I simply need to find a way to start crawling back to the light.
So – this is me – and I cannot stress loudly enough that it might not be you. I am sharing, not advising.
When I’m in the deep dark well, these are things I do NOT need… Sympathy. Pity. Reminding of how lucky I am or how much worse off other people are or that everyone feels like this at times. Cos guess what? I know all that and right now it sure ain’t helping. I don’t need reminding of all the tools I have at my disposal. I certainly don’t need to be told to ‘just breathe’ – because frankly at the bottom of the deep dark well, breathing is just about all I am still managing to do.
Perhaps I should tell you about the well. Lots of people describe depression in different ways. Some talk about a dark cloud. Winston Churchill called it his black dog. For me it is a deep dark well. The well isn’t loneliness, but it is where I risk ending up when loneliness approaches. It is depression, and anger, and self-loathing, and all that stuff. It’s full of sticky tar and heavy air. I have been down there before. I don’t like it, so I am very aware when life events or irrational emotions start pulling me towards it. I know to interrupt that trajectory.
I know the things that help, that rebalance and restore me: swimming, tai chi, the beach, the woods, losing myself in books, trying to write, doing silly things, finding comedy to watch, being out in the sun or the rain. I know that when the cause of slipping towards the well is loneliness then I need to reconnect with myself, with my confidant, with my friends, with my community. Probably in that order.
As we get to know ourselves, we discover things that nudge us in negative directions, things that trigger us or block us or trip us up. Sometimes though, those things are unseen and perhaps even unknowable. I went to bed feeling good about my life, looking forward to swimming in the morning
and then meeting up with different people later in the day. I woke up feeling like a worthless piece of shite that was just taking up space on the planet. Seriously. With no idea where it came from.
The simple fact is that sometimes, the slope is steep or iced or sudden, and whoosh! There I am. Feeling lonely and ashamed and angry and depressed – and telling myself that no-one can help me down here. While it is true that we need to know how to accept help and support when it is offered, I also believe that no-one can help me until I am ready to be helped. Part of the problem with my deep dark well is that is deep, and I cannot hear what anyone is trying to tell me. They can only help me once I have found myself down there and started the climb back out.
The most useful things I have learned (for my own process) is that the first rule is just accept it. Not: this is ok. More like this is fucking horrible, but it too will pass. I find that there is a certain amount of just waiting it out that has to be done. A strange thing about waiting (whether it is for clouds to lift, darkness to lighten or trains to arrive) is that it passes more quickly once you stop fighting it.
The second rule (because this is me!) is: focus on the good stuff. Not: what is good about this situation, not what can I learn from this, more like ok, this is fucking horrible, but what can I do, given how I feel, that might make it a bit less so? This isn’t about cure, it’s about comfort.
I’m achievement motivated (sad, but true) so bizarrely what helped on this occasion was clearing the last batch of hedge-cuttings into the newly emptied garden waste bin. A small thing. It was as much as I could summon up the energy for. I cancelled meeting up with friends. I apologised for not returning phone calls. I hid up. But at least I did my tai chi practice and I got the bamboo and wisteria branches off the deck and into the bin.
I felt a tiny bit more like me.
Then I watched Taskmaster. Bob Mortimer always makes me laugh. Laughter always helps.
I started to read a Feng Shui handbook. That helped less because it told me that my house is totally, 180 degree, mis-aligned with my energy requirements. Hey ho! Perhaps I need to use the back door rather than the front.
Then I slept. On and off. In one of the not-asleep-in-the-middle-of-the-night moments, I picked a random Pratchett from my bookshelf. The Discworld is comfort-food for my soul. Not chicken soup, but maybe chocolate cake. Or raw cauliflower. We all know what we need! I re-read the stories whenever I am struggling with the world, because Pratchett turns the world inside out so that
I can see it more clearly. I first read them because they are funny. I go back to them when I need cheering up, but over time I have come to realise that they cheer me not only because they make me laugh, but because they are part of my tarot pack. One of my kairomancy tools.
So this is what I learned this time around:
“This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay…Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.”
It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head, you couldn’t make them work at all.
A helpful reminder that we always have a choice. Our feelings are a function of the interaction between our external situation, our thoughts, and our own actions. Two of the three we have a choice about, which stacks the odds heavily in our favour. It was a reminder to believe in myself, in my own witchcraft. My word-witch-craft.
More importantly I was reminded:
“Remember the hat you wear! Remember the job that is in front of you! Balance! Balance is the thing. Hold balance in the centre…”
The hat I wear is not the pointy black one of Discworld witches, it is the word-witch hat of a writer, whose purpose, to quote Dr Murthy again, is “to tilt the world back towards love.” I like that. I usually express it is ‘putting some love into the world’ but I like the idea that the love is already there if we can only re-align ourselves with it.
So then, I put my writer’s hat back on, remembered that my work is all about the good stuff, and sat down to write.
And I realised that sometimes the ‘good stuff’ is sharing that we all have ‘not good stuff’ to deal with too. Sometimes it’s ‘actual bad stuff’ happening,and sometimes it’s just stuff happening in our head, but it’s all real and maybe we could all be a tiny bit more honest about that. Maybe, the more we share of how it feels for us, the more we share about how we deal with it, the more likely those who
haven’t yet found their tools and their way might do so. The good stuff, I reckon, includes talking gently and hopefully helpfully about the bad stuff
Find Brené Brown talking to Dr. Vivek Murthy on Spotify (Unlocking Us podcasts)Terry Pratchett quotes are from Wintersmith (Doubleday 2006)
