One morning a few months ago, in a local café where I go too often to get coffee (partly because I have a severe caffeine habit, and partly because it is something to do), I clocked the bags of plump bagels on the shelves and I cried. Initially, I couldn’t work out this inexplicable reaction, but as I walked home it dawned on me – how lovely it would have been to spontaneously pick up a bag and take them home to someone. It was the smallness of that fantasy – to eat breakfast with somebody else – and how it now felt ridiculous and unfathomably grandiose that stung. I have nobody to share things with right now, and I haven’t had for months.
What struck me then and has persistently dogged me since is hard to admit: I feel lonely. It is a constant sense of lacking and longing that in the past few months, with the hokey cokey of lockdowns, and the promise of a return to ‘real’ life seeming further away than ever, has grown into a sadness that is at times so acute I feel myself gasping for air. I am a touchy-feely person who desperately misses physical contact, so much so that I would now happily snog just about anyone I pass in the street. I cannot shake the feeling of being left out from life.
My own loneliness is a peculiar sense of being simultaneously not enough and too much. I am too small to fill the gaps in my now stripped-bare life, and my thoughts too big to let me exist in the emptiness in peace. In the quiet of my flat, during days that can drag endlessly and sag with purposelessness, negative thoughts that would normally be casually dismissed swell to fill the place left by dinners out, meetings, and the general clatter of ‘normal’ life.
Certainly, I am lucky on many levels, particularly because I know I am not lacking love and can recognise that my loneliness is structural. I live on my own, I am single, and my inner circle is scattered across the world. But because of the current situation, that means I spend a lot of time –too much– on my own.
Of course, being lonely is not the prerogative of the one-person household – a recent report from the Royal Foundation saw 63% of parents surveyed say they felt lonely, compared with 38% before the pandemic. It is possible to feel loneliness gnawing away at you in a relationship or a flat share. On the flipside, it is very possible to experience solitude without loneliness.
But the pandemic has forced us all to prioritise in a brutally rigid way. In a society where it can feel like romantic relationships and a traditional family unit are the prize, I am left with the stark sense that I am nobody’s priority. I feel unseen. Surely, it’s time to reassess that, and to regard friendships not as an added bonus, support act or pretty accessory, but as essential, epic relationships of equal importance.
Having said that – and I am wary of insulting the sisterhood here – despite always having preferred to be on my own than be with just anyone, being single right now is hard. We have lost many of the pay-offs that normally make it fun: the spontaneity, the possibility, the chance that anything will happen. Unsurprisingly, single people looking for a relationship have been struggling, with the British Psychological Society warning in recent weeks that nine in 10 were experiencing loneliness. I hope I do not need to tell you that for those of us on our own, a support bubble is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Meanwhile, over the past few months, I have asked myself repeatedly whether it is my fault: did I not invest enough in relationships? Was I not sufficiently captivating company? Should I have settled for the first – or even last – man who came along? Am I not independent? The answer to all of these questions, I know, is no, but that doesn’t mean it feels that way.
Unhelpfully, it is a taboo (a boring, unsexy one) to admit to being lonely. Nobody wants to be Billy No Mates, Eleanor Rigby, a loner. I feel guilty, too; what right do I have to feel lonely when I do, as one confused confidante exclaimed, ‘have so many friends!’. Nothing about me looks lonely; I know how to sparkle socially. It is easier to cast the lonely person as ‘them’, somehow other, rather than what they are: just like us.
I have found it hard to say the words ‘I feel lonely’ to anyone until recently (and I do prefer to say ‘I feel lonely’ than ‘I am lonely’, which allows me to reclaim some sense of control, feelings are subjective and impermanent). I didn’t want to admit to it for fear of seeming needy or dramatic, but I have found it cathartic to do.
We can only stiff-upper-lip it to a point and replying ‘fine, thanks!’ when someone genuinely asks you how you are only isolates us further. I know that my true friends will not judge me for feeling lonely any more than I would judge them for being exasperated by home-schooling or fearful of the virus. Many of them have said they also feel it themselves and I have been unreasonably surprised – the gulf between what our lives look like on the outside and how they feel on the inside is huge. Perceived privileges don’t necessarily immunise you against suffering.
While we know that connection is the cure for loneliness, it does require effort right now. But if I had one piece of advice it would be this: reach out, make the call, be honest. On a practical level, getting dressed – in real clothes – helps me to feel connected to a world beyond my own head. And when possible, I walk with people too. It is impossible to overstate how precious the espresso shot of in-person contact is.
Even casual interactions can be invested with a touching humanity. I now take the time to talk to Sunil in the corner shop and stop and ask my neighbour how he is getting on when I see him on the stairs. I used to like the anonymity of a big city and never would have done that before. It’s not altruism, either – I get a lot from those fleeting moments.
But above all I think it’s OK, empowering even, to say ‘life sucks’ today. I don’t want to talk about the ‘new normal’ because this is not normal. My pre-Covid life was noisy, chaotic, full. ‘Real-life’ Laura was guilty of cancelling plans or vocally longing for a weekend of doing nothing (the humble brag of the luxuriously stressed). I hate her now but, to know what I miss, is a privilege.
And to share my story with you, to confront and own my messy, destabilising feelings, reminds me that even though I feel lonely, I might not actually be alone.