Loneliness is an existential risk. 

There is a reason we don’t think about loneliness when things are good. When we’re generally happy, we have the energy and reserves to do the things we want and need to do. Work. Exercise. Prepare healthy food. Read. Create. When we are content, our inner voices are engaged with contented things. Busy and engaged are enough when life is good.

But life doesn’t stay good. Every life cycles in and out of good and bad, pain and joy. This is universal and immutable.  The way to survive pain, to grow from it, to thrive beyond it, is to be surrounded by love. All different kinds of love: The love that you give and the love you receive, from family, friends, community, pets. 

In the midst of great suffering everyone gets lost; for days, or weeks, or months. The presence of loved ones is both a buffer and a reminder that pain is just one part of a life. Really strong connections resist being pushed away, refuse to allow the loved-one to  become lost to the hurt and isolation that always accompanies emotional trauma. In the midst of great pain, the presence of beloveds is a reminder that pain is temporary.

So it’s during times of loss and heartbreak that loneliness becomes unbearable … finding oneself with only oneself is the most isolating feeling in the world. There is no buffer, no distraction, no gentle (or not-so-gentle) pressure to reclaim one’s happiness. When we are hurting it feels impossible to build the connections that are ultimately the only cure to psychic pain.

The lonely person will ultimately emerge from pain, but they recover more slowly, and with an intense awareness of the loneliness they may not have recognized or been concerned about before. 

Research suggests that people who are not lonely are more emotionally regulated. Whether that’s due to personality characteristics or learned behaviors, the not-lonely are more likely to approach life — and therefore pain and disappointment — from a place of problem-solving. They seek emotional support, treat themselves kindly inside their own thoughts, and express how they feel. 

The same research suggests that people who are lonely approach the challenges of life by distracting themselves, trying to influence or change the people or situations that cause discomfort, and denial. 

These two different behavior sets, those of the not-lonely and those of the lonely, are in play when life is good and when life is bad. The result is that the not-lonely behaviors lead to not-lonely people, which means that during the inevitable bad times, the not-lonely people are not alone.

So loneliness is not a sentence. 

Emotionally regulated behaviors can be learned with practice and commitment. Anyone can learn to replace distraction-via-video-games with journaling. Anyone can learn to replace thrill-seeking-via-extreme-sports with volunteering. Anyone can choose to accept and express their feelings about something they cannot change over trying to manipulate or influence a different outcome. 

Anyone can choose to become an active participant in their emotional and external life rather than a passive observer.

Learning to behave in new ways isn’t easy, and unburdening oneself of loneliness is the work of months and years, not days. But there is so much hope in understanding that you are not doomed to loneliness.  Even if it’s hard to imagine or visualize what a not-lonely life looks like, taking a leap of faith toward that life is filled with potential and anticipation. 

Television shows like My 600 Pound Life help overweight people to envision a future of being fit and healthy while setting realistic expectations about the time and commitment required to achieve that life. The lifestyle and mental fitness challenge for the lonely is similar … consistent practice coupled with a sense of achievement that grows over time and leads to the life you want.

Bleakly accepting one’s loneliness denies the possibility of happiness, which is so unfortunate, because happiness is always possible.

Which brings us back to pain and suffering. 

When we cannot tolerate the idea of pain or suffering, we cannot truly live. The avoidance of life’s downs requires the avoidance of anything that can lead to loss, which means avoidance of love, friendship, dreams, and hope. It leads to loneliness. And that’s not really living.

To fulfill one’s potential is to experience fully all that life has to offer; pain, joy, and everything in-between. To learn and grow from all of it. 

All this is possible when we throw open the doors to our gated hearts, fling wide the windows on our chattering minds, let go of our fears of failure and disappointment, accept that all good outcomes require effort, and make room for the belief that we can change. 

When we do this, loneliness cannot endure. Yes, bad times will continue to cycle in and out of our lives, but each subsequent loss will be met with an ever-growing buffer of self-awareness, support, and love. Each emergence from loss will reinforce our awareness that happiness and contentment will always return.

No lover, no child, no parent or sibling or pet can save us from loneliness. We can only save ourselves. And this is empowering, because it means we do not have to wait, We can begin, in this moment, to craft the life we want and deserve. So what is holding you back? The time will go by either way. By this time next year, you could be less lonely and more fulfilled than you have ever been. And still that will be only the beginning.

Nobody loses herself all
at once.
It's stealthy.
It spreads itself out to
blend in. Slip by.
You don't realize
you should be mourning.
You go on.
You do,
while pain puddles in shadows.
It's life.
It waits.
Late nights it's a moth. Or imagined?
Batted away, it talks to your dreams.
Daylight scatters it,
until it doesn't.
It begins to wake with you
Wake you
Walk with you
You should have been mourning,
but you missed it.
Until the pieces were gone,
And you can't understand how you didn't know.

andrea hill

At the end of the day, we all have to fight our demons alone. And I think that's the source of loneliness. If you spend your whole life insisting there are no demons to fight or hiding your demons or determined to fight them in private, you end up without anyone having your back. The people who aren't lonely have a cheer squad who love them, demons and all. 

... urgently cancelling my $2.99/month Twitter Blue account on the news of a possible sale closing with Elon Musk ...

Sometimes I envy the non-reflective. For them, life just is. They just are. It seems peaceful and ... simple. Unlike the wear of evaluating and reevaluating that expands with time and age and accompanies one to bed at night and wakes one up in the morning.

One theme that presents itself over and over again in human history is that during times of great stress – famine, war, natural disasters – the capacity for empathy in general suffers as people attend to their own survival. That’s why stories about people rising above catastrophes make us feel so good – because we realize that it’s special, and admirable, to rise above one’s own pain to care for others.

So when we have tremendous failures of empathy, I tend to look for the tragedy driving it. And right now, I don’t see it.

The excuse that the far right is using, not just in America but also throughout Europe, is that immigrants are taking away our jobs, our tax dollars, even our identities. Apparently, immigrants have been elevated to the level of natural disaster or famine. But as I write this, I’m working in Europe, and when I’m not in Europe, I’m in the American heartland, and I know for a fact that this is not true.

We are well off. We are well fed. For the most part, we have jobs. Has the wealth gap grown in the past 30 years? Most definitely. Are the kinds of jobs that afforded a high-middle-class lifestyle disappearing? Yes. But the fact that we aren’t as well off as we want to be is not the same thing as suffering. All I can see is that we have lost perspective. We became nations of entitled people, and in the process, we are losing our humanity. In the meantime, people who are suffering from real wars, real poverty, real disasters are being turned away at our borders because . . . we are tending to our own war wounds, such as they are (not). This sense of entitlement is taking precedence over our ability to care about the basic (very basic) needs and human rights of others.

Second, our definitions of ourselves have apparently become small. Very, very, very small. Why do I say that? Because we can’t seem to muster any energy to care about the problems of others, which obviously means we cannot relate to anyone.

For example, I am working right now with several women with young children. They are trying so hard to take advantage of the time I am here to work with them in Italy, but they also have all the demands of getting home, caring for children, cooking dinner, maintaining a home. They are young professional mothers. I remember so well being a young professional mother. It’s exhausting! We are the same.

While sitting in the airport in Istanbul, I had a lovely conversation with a woman who was traveling with her three children to meet her husband, who had moved to Canada ahead of them for work. She was so stressed about the move, wondering how it would be for her children, would they be accepted, would they lose sight of their own culture. I’m not a Muslim woman, and I don’t have to learn a new language, but I totally understand being a mother and a wife. She was also very stressed about leaving her parents behind. There, too, we could connect, because we are both daughters.

I spend much of my time working with CEOs and entrepreneurs. These are more often men than women, typically self-made. I’m not a man, and I often roll my eyes at the Boys’ Club of International Business. But, I can relate to being a CEO, and all the stress and isolation that comes with that. In that way, we are the same, and we can work from that place of empathy.

There is not a person in the world with whom you cannot connect on some level. We are all someone’s wife, husband, daughter, brother, mother, aunt, teacher. We have all experienced loss, joy, and the pride of some accomplishment. We have all, at one time, wanted something more, different, or better.

I do not know how any mother looks at the videos of children being removed from the parents at the US/Mexican border without feeling her insides contract with the pain of empathy. Having my child forcibly removed from me would kill me. I do not know how any white man looks at a black man without recognizing that he would die of shame if he were treated with the emasculating lack of respect that black men expect every single day. When white women and black women fall out over the goals of feminist activism, white women need to stop and remember that women – of all races – still hold disproportionate responsibility for holding the social fabric of their communities together, and that what a black woman must do to hold a black community together is generally much harder than what a white woman must do in her own. Because . . . women.

I do not believe it is possible to justify violence through empathy, but of course, I’m non-violent, so I can’t relate. There are people whom I respect who believe there is a place for violence in the pursuit of change. So I try to understand them through some other filter, even if it’s to simply stay in communication while remaining in deep disagreement over tactics. I know people who are conspiracy theorists. I don’t believe that airplanes are spewing chemicals to turn us all into sheep, but I’ve often gone to the Tarot cards as a way to ease my mind over the unknown. Are these things so different? 

Perhaps our biggest failures are when we define ourselves too narrowly, or too generically. By thinking we are only one thing (a nationality, or a skin color), we lose sight of all the things we are and can be. When we define ourselves too narrowly, we fail to see all the ways we can connect with other humans, and in that failure lies all the previous failures of humanity.

Then, when we pile on a sense of entitlement, we make it worse. By thinking we are owed any particular outcome (middle class, or boss, or boat owner), we lose sight of the fact that the universe doesn’t owe any of us anything, that a mere happy accident of birth landed us in a country in which we can pretty much assume we won’t starve to death or have our entire town burned down.

More empathy. Less entitlement. Surely, we can do better than this.

Perfectionism is a luxury for (starving) artists, or artists with benefactors. The rest of us must learn the difference between being in love with our own ideas and being in love with progress.

Maybe the reason its so hard to remain in quarantine is that it's hard to outrun sadness when you're forced to be still.

2020 is total pants.

Taking a knee ... Long the choice of peaceful, PRAYERFUL resistance.

I sometimes wonder what our country would be like today if Christians had thrown themselves into eradicating poverty or inequality with the same energy they invested in fighting abortion.

I suspect the fear of being afraid is the most destructive fear of all.

Well, Catholics pray to saints," I mutter to myself as I begin my nightly prayer to RBG.