My loneliness story

They tell young writers to write what you know. My platonic life partner emailed me after my last post asking how I think about loneliness.

I believe I know loneliness.

I don’t think I’d have described myself as lonely as a kid. If anything, I’d probably have complained about having too many people around too much of the time. I loved sitting on the carpet in my bedroom listening to CDs or the radio making jewelry by myself.

I hated going places where the main activity was socializing. School dances sucked. No one wanted to dance with me. In elementary school kids made fun of me for being ugly.

Mom never pressured me to socialize, except I had to be in one after-school activity. And I had to go to church. But I spent weekends with my dad, and he and my stepmom wanted me to socialize. They were onto something. But, as it turns out, sometimes showing up isn’t enough.

At one middle-school dance I stood alone in the hallway waiting to be picked up rather than stand alone in the gym. A teacher saw me and talked to me until my dad came. I enjoyed the conversation so much, and probably felt so much relief, that I developed a crush on that teacher and would look for him in the hallways afterwards.

My takeaway from all this was that the vast majority of kids just kind of sucked. They were boring and immature. And also they didn’t like me.

Dad would sometimes remark about how much better I got along with adults than kids. I preferred adult men to everyone else. When I started going into AOL chat rooms I was always looking for grown men. Thank God I was somehow so bad at finding grown men who wanted to chat with pre-teen girls. It probably helped that I only wanted to talk about politics.

I’ve already written about my former cheerleader stepmom literally frustratedly scribbling me a written invitation one church lock-in at a laser tag place.

I went and watched everyone else talking and hanging out between games. I remember trying to talk to other kids and it being so awkward and uncomfortable for both of us.

I almost always found a single friend for every context. And I always had a crush or a boyfriend I “dated” for many years at church.

High school was better. I still had one best friend at school and my stepsister at church. But I also had their friends. And growing small boobs and getting braces meant I almost always had a boyfriend too.

College was very much like middle school, except nicer, wealthier, and more Christian and female. Samford University was, and probably still is, 70% female. More than 80% of students joined a sorority or fraternity. I didn’t have money for dues.

My assigned roommate called me over the summer to ask if I wanted to coordinate bedspreads. I had to tell her I’d already bought mine at Walmart. I put up a Pearl Jam poster. She put up pictures of Jessica Simpson. Eventually she and another sorority sister petitioned to switch roommates and I met another scholarship kid who I’m still friends with today.

I remember sitting in Journalism classes and listening to the other girls talk about the Bachelor or watching the girls head out from the dorms to the clubs. I expected clubs to be like school dances. And I wasn’t going to watch the Bachelor for love or money.

I met my best friend during orientation and my boyfriend who I married right after graduation during my first semester. I also hung out with a few other people sometimes. But I spent a lot of time in my room playing FreeCell.

It wasn’t until I was in my first job out of school that things changed dramatically. It was a great job, making good money for the time and place. I was ambitious and a planner, so I started reading blogs about career advancement.

This is when I learned about “networking” and felt stupid for not realizing sooner that this is how everyone gets good jobs and opportunities. I kicked myself for not trying to make friends with my classmates and professors in college. Maybe I could have watched the Bachelor for money.

I started going to networking events and trying out the tactics I was learning online. I tried introducing myself to people, looking them in the eye, smiling, asking open-ended questions, and taking a genuine interest in them.

And you know what? That shit worked!

Things started making sense to me a few years ago when I started reading women who’ve been diagnosed with Autism describe their experiences. It’s funny to me now that Penelope Trunk, who has Autism, was my favorite career writer as a youngin.

I realized that things that are intuitive to other people, like eye contact, need to be explained to me. Things that need to be explained in-detail to other people, like intersectional feminism, I grasp really quickly.

I couldn’t connect with people who didn’t share an interest with me because I didn’t care about them by default. I was deeply curious about certain ideas, systems, and outcomes. I was deeply incurious about how a random person’s week was going and it didn’t occur to me to pretend. It almost never occurred to me to lie or pretend, about anything.

I’ve learned that loneliness is self-reinforcing. It’s part of a scarcity mentality. After enough rejection, I started to expect people to reject me before we spoke. I brought this anxiety into every interaction, which made every interaction worse.

Everything changed when I started going to events with people who shared an interest with me and making eye contact, etc. with them.

It was around then that I fully realized I was hot. I’d always assumed I was ugly based on how people treated me most of the time. What a relief to realize I was just very socially inept! Eye contact is cheaper than plastic surgery.

I eventually realized the tactics that made me successful at “networking” also worked to make friends.

From then on I always had a lot of friends.

Weirdly, I think I really started to feel lonely once I had a lot of friends.

I was really unhappy in my marriage. I remember smoking cloves on our porch and deciding I might be depressed. I found a primary care physician who prescribed me an antidepressant after a few minutes. Then I stopped being able to pee, so I quit after a few days. Eventually, I realized I needed to leave my husband. But I’d worry about who would drive me home if I needed surgery. I had friends. But I didn’t have anyone I felt comfortable asking to do me any real favors.

That seemed bad, but not like something I could really do anything about. It wasn’t until therapy that I really named my loneliness, said I wanted closer friends, and began working on making that happen.

Like “networking,” the tactics I used to deepen my friendships seem obvious in hindsight, but weren’t intuitive to me. I’m still working on this stuff. I’m accepting help from people, believing I can reciprocate eventually. I’m apologizing when I get overwhelmed and don’t respond to people for extended periods instead of just slinking away and feeling ashamed forever. I’m showing up even when I worry I’ll be atrocious company and allowing people to decide for themselves if I am.

The least lonely I’ve ever felt has been since I’ve met the Boyfriend. My mother told me more than once that there’s nothing lonelier than being with a man who doesn’t love you. My partners loved me. But I yearned for something very specific. I pined for an insane, obsessive, effusive romantic and sexual love. Today, I have that. And good friends. And a network. And I’m close to much of my family of origin.

I still feel lonely sometimes. I long for community geographically close to me. I long for aspects of the community I had in San Francisco and D.C. I miss catching up with my friends over a drink.

I know a lot of people are far lonelier every day than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t look back at my former selves and certainly not my current self and think I was or am super especially lonely. What strikes me, looking back, isn’t that it was so bad. What I think is that I’ll never know how it could have been. There are so many people I was around by happenstance who I never got to know because I was too afraid and didn’t have the tools.

I told the Boyfriend early on that what I’m most afraid of isn’t losing him. It’s wasting my opportunity to know him deeply.

Like drugs and sex, community is an experience whose bounds I do not know. I don’t know how close I can get to another person. I don’t know how many people I can be very close to. I don’t yet know how much interdependence I will be able to manage in the future.

Sometime after starting to make friends I started reading a lot about what science says about happiness. The conclusion I kept coming across is that one thing has the biggest impact: Community. Deep ties make the difference between a life full of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, joy, mental health, and even physical health, and a life without. Loose ties are also important.

I got into politics because I wanted the world to be more fair. I got into libertarianism because I wanted the world to be more prosperous and free. But over the years I’ve realized wealth and autonomy are less important to me, and probably to most other people, than connection.

Bound up, enmeshed, interdependent, however you want to put it, I think the extent to which you feel that way is the extent to which you’re having a good life. Well, at least I think the extent to which I feel that way is the extent to which I’m having a good life.

I believe humans are evolved to be extremely close to each other, in every possible sense of the word. The further we get from that state, the more unmoored, apathetic, anxious, depressed, and unhealthy we’re going to feel. Most of us, anyway.

Psychedelics tend to dissolve the ego and point to a oneness. They’re also rated as among the most meaningful experiences of people’s lives. Baby monkeys prefer cloth mothers without food to cold machines with food. Baby humans given adequate food, water, and shelter will literally die without touch. Social support determines whether an event is traumatizing or merely unpleasant. I think these facts point to something. Perhaps connection is important.

Maybe this is oversimplifying or overfitting, but in a way, every crisis we face as a species seems to have disconnection from ourselves and each other at the root.

I think I’m kind of obsessed with loneliness not because I’ve been oh so lonely, but because I’m not stupid. I’m not stupid, and yet, it’s taken me a long time and a good amount of explicit instruction from books, blogs, and a therapist to understand how loneliness operates, how ubiquitous it is, what to do about it, and how vitally important connection is to everything else that might matter in life.

If it’s taken me this many years and this much effort to understand all this, and there’s still plenty I don’t know about loneliness and connection, I suspect a good many people still don’t know what I know.

So that’s my story, thus far, in a nutshell, with loneliness.

What’s yours?