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.
I moved cities last year and I didn't realise how lonely it would be.
Everyone said it would take six months and then I'd have a life. Six months came and went and I still ate dinner alone most nights, still didn't have the sort of friend you can ring on a Sunday afternoon for no reason, still had a phone full of people in the city I left and almost nobody in the city I'm in. I would catch myself, sometimes, in the supermarket, just being relieved to make small talk with the person at the till because it was the most words I'd said all day.
If this is you — newly somewhere, or not so newly somewhere, with the slow grief of a life that hasn't filled in yet — you are not failing at it. Building a life from scratch as an adult is the hardest social thing anyone is ever asked to do, and almost nobody talks about it because admitting it feels like admitting you can't make friends, when actually it just means you live in a world that wasn't built for it.
It does fill in. Slowly, and not in the way you expected, and the friends you end up with are usually not the ones you thought you were looking for. But it fills in. The supermarket conversations are not nothing while you wait.