Talking to People Didn’t Save Me From Loneliness — Writing Did

Loneliness is a curious thing. You can go to social event after social event and still feel lonely by the end of it all. No amount of party invitations can cure the feeling that has been gnawing at me for longer than I can remember.

When people think of someone lonely, they imagine someone with disheveled hair and an anxiety disorder crying on the bathroom floor — but reality is much more nuanced than that.

When I told my ex-therapist that I ignored my family’s calls and text messages for weeks to the point that they thought I was dead, and that it took me two months to respond to my friends’ DMs, she diagnosed me with social anxiety disorder. However, that felt like a misdiagnosis.

I wasn’t self-isolating because I was scared of people. I was self-isolating because I didn’t derive emotional satisfaction from social interactions, hence the lack of incentive. So for a long time, I thought that I was just incapable of feeling lonely. In some twisted way, I took pride in being “the lone wolf.”

But was that the truth?

I think that the way the media portrays loneliness is an oversimplification. It depicts the most visibly noticeable manifestations of it as the norm. A common portrayal of loneliness sums it up as, “I feel alone, hence, I need to socially interact with people to feel less alone.” If that were true, it would make dealing with the situation relatively easy.

But I think that there is a more lethal type of loneliness that is trickier to diagnose.

This type of loneliness deludes the person into believing that they have acclimated to it. You think, I have grown adjusted to my maladjustment. We have lost the incentive to deal with the situation at all. It’s analogous to a person who has sunk deep enough that they are not able to yell, unlike a person on the surface just beginning to drown.

What cured my loneliness temporarily (for several days) was when I uploaded an article, and someone I respected replied that they had read it. All they said was, “It was good.” Yet, it meant a lot to me. Because like a lot of writers, the only time we are ever truly ourselves is when we are writing.

Why do people write?

Writing is a fundamentally solitary activity. You are pouring your thoughts on paper with no definite audience. Your “audience” is a vague amalgamation of the many people you wished had heard you but didn’t, and now you are sitting them down and making them read everything you wanted to say about a certain topic in its entirety.

No cuts, no interruptions.

When you confide in people, people feel the need to provide their opinion, which is formed out of incomplete premises. They have heard your story for two minutes, while you have lived with yourself for your entire life.

Writing allows you to articulate complex and emotionally loaded thoughts. Communicating verbally, on the other hand, requires you to deliver information impromptu.

Your speech is ladened with verbal fillers and rough estimations. Your brain struggles to articulate ideas on the spot. As a result, you have to use body gestures as a substitute for the lack of precise word choice.

What drives you to improve your writing isn’t money or some self-assured productivity goal. It’s to avoid the feeling of being misunderstood. The more precisely and beautifully you write, the less likely your words are going to be twisted in someone’s head or your muddled words rejected out of personal convenience.

It is nearly impossible to deliver on the fly all the nuance necessary to contextualize your problem in a way that makes it sound truly sympathetic to someone who has never been in your shoes.

Writing, meanwhile, allows us to frame the main point we want to deliver with all the complexity we had to deal with when we experienced it firsthand.

But most importantly, we would prefer to be labeled shameless exhibitionists for artistic reasons rather than attention-seeking whores emotionally damaged from trauma.

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, referring to how lonely people tend to inappropriately overshare with others they are not very close to because they have no one else they could confide in.

Maybe the gratification from knowing someone read and liked our writing is so great, simply because it is confirmation that someone cares for us.

I nearly cried in a café, waiting for my hot chocolate, when I received a voice message from an old friend who I had not reached out to for a long time.

She said, “Hey love, I hope you’re doing okay today. I came across a video today from an elderly lady who advised us to not hide our love. And I just wanted to take thirty seconds of your day today to tell you that I love you and that I hope you’re having a great night.”

How do you help someone who has adjusted to their maladjustment? No matter how hard we try, we might never understand what it’s like to be another person.

“You can never understand me,” is a common source of conflict between couples. The attempt to try to intertwine yourself with your partner but still remain your own person feels asymptotic.

But fortunately, oftentimes, all it takes is to let them know that you love them.

“You write well,” does not only mean “Your words flow well.”

It also means, “I hear you, I understand you, and I care for your story.”

—

This post was previously published on Age of Empathy.

***

Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.

All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.

A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.