Letters for loneliness
Loneliness can show up in a crowded room, in a marriage that has gone quiet, after a move to a new city, in retirement when the work that organised your week is gone, after the kids have grown up and out, after the people who used to know you have drifted, after coming out, after coming back from somewhere. It can show up in your twenties when everyone seems to have a group already, and in your sixties when everyone is busy with grandchildren you do not have. The letters in this theme are written by people who have been through that particular kind of quiet — the kind that does not get fixed by being around more people — and want you to know it is not permanent, even when it feels like it. Read one. Save the one that finds you.
The loneliest kind of lonely is the kind with people in the room.
Everyone understands the empty-flat kind. Nobody quite knows what to do with the kind where you are sitting next to someone who loves you, or you think loves you, and they cannot see the thing you are carrying, and the gap between you is wider than any room you've ever been alone in. That kind of loneliness has a particular shame attached to it — what is wrong with me, that I am lonely with all these people here.
Nothing is wrong with you. Being unseen by the people closest to you is one of the deeper hurts a person can carry. It is not ungrateful. It is not dramatic. It is the loneliness of not being known.
I don't have a solution. I just wanted to name it, because I know it sometimes helps to read the thing you can't say.