11/23/2025
The Art of Being Lonely
In a world that is so connected, the feeling of loneliness is something that haunts a lot of people. Being lonely is a complex feeling with various levels that differ for everyone. From your basic feeling of being alone, like the silence after a party. All the way to feeling like someone is lying next to you in bed when you know no one is really there, the emptiness or awareness that something is constantly lacking. However loneliness feels to you, it’s an epidemic that touches those you wouldn’t think it would.
✨Symptoms of Loneliness
I find it odd how many people struggle with being alone, especially with the access to so many avenues for communication. You’d think it’d be easy to find someone who gets you, complicated or not, feelings or emotionless. There has to be someone out there for everyone, right? Yet, I think there’s a loneliness epidemic. Only people who are truly lonely can tell when someone else is too; most of the time, it goes unnoticed by loved ones and people in our lives. You can always tell by a person’s eyes. There’s an unusual sadness that connects you immediately. Lonely people tend to be ones that used to be funny or kind, but then life happened. It’s hard to keep the happiness when emptiness is there too; then it becomes a crowd of overwhelming feelings. And people wonder why anxiety is on the rise. Being lonely isn’t just something that happens to you all of a sudden; it’s an aching process.
You start off being surrounded by people that understand you. For me, I was always on a competitive sports teams, so I was always with other girls my age. These people became my family, the same way my friends in high school did. My life went from making beds for 8 people on the floor in the living room to quiet nights by myself. Sleepovers to early nights and too much melatonin. You start to notice how silent your life gets when you become lonely. Days slow down too much or go by too fast before you can get anything done or want to, at least. Getting lonely is a hard thing to do, a quiet transition, a haunting experience that never leaves you. So we do what anyone else would: try to fight it off for as long as you can.
The parties, the different groups of friends, sleeping around with people you just met, chasing the feeling of belonging somewhere even if it’s temporary. Just to pity myself in the shower for knowingly choosing things that are no good for me. But then I ask myself, “How good can loneliness be if it leads to this?” and I am back where I started. Trying to find things that I can deem “not as bad.” Loneliness brought me an eating disorder, something I could control the timing of. Until I couldn’t, driving to doctor’s appointments alone and therapy, leading me to an even deeper feeling of emptiness. It gets to a point where you’d do almost anything: substance abuse, abusive relationships, hyper sexuality, etc. Something. Anything. As long as it takes away that feeling of being alone, you’d be first in line to try it. But a person can only take these habits for so long until they get used to it, getting comfortable with that missing piece.
✨Going on a Date With Loneliness
When you are lonely for so long, you start to become accustomed to the feeling. You’ve sat with it for so long, it builds its own presence that takes up real space. After living with something for long, you begin to treat it like a friend. Especially for people with attachment problems, when something is a constant, it morphs into a thing you start to cherish. Here is where we’ve reached the acceptance stage. Loneliness becomes a friend, a partner that is always there. It becomes the driving factor behind every little thing you do, trying to avoid the fact that you still feel lonely when you do anything. For me, I kept loneliness around for so long because I liked how easy it allowed me to write. Writing something sad got more of a reaction than any other line of words I could string along. When loneliness aids you like that, it is easier to accept it like a friend more than usual.
I spent so many years being lonely that I always wondered if I convinced myself that I liked the feeling. However, I think there’s something to that even though it might not be entirely true. I realized how much I loved my own space, the quiet, and the peace of a lack of presence from someone else. Being lonely was an excuse for something I thought sounded rude. But being lonely isn’t and wasn’t that awful. Like I said before, it helped me to write and lean into my art. I had an emotion I knew well enough to pull inspiration from. It gave me the peace I didn’t experience in my childhood, a feeling I didn’t know I loved that much. So when I think about being lonely, while there are things about it that I wish I could change, I can’t help but acknowledge the good things about it either. As much as I crave being next to someone, I still think I crave being lonely just the same, if not more. Yet it doesn’t delete the need or desire for attention or love.
Finding someone that understands what being lonely truly feels like is such a rare experience. You know those people that you instantly feel tied to when you hear how sad they are? You both feel like your lives have been braided together but haven’t seemed to meet just yet? That is what it’s like to meet someone who feels loneliness in the ways you do. It takes a special kind of trauma to accept loneliness in someone, a trauma you can connect to. For a long time, I yearned to love someone who understood. Someone that knew when space was needed but never had to be reminded to love me. But that’s the thing about loneliness, it is a constant reminder that you are and will always be alone in this feeling. I think I have had partners and people that understand there’s a sadness within me but not understand enough to connect the reasons why. Which I don’t blame them for, a lot of people didn’t grow up the way I did, but if you did, then you get it. But I have yet to meet a person that has fully understood how loneliness sits with me. While I do yearn to love someone and receive love, I fear that I will always yearn for that constant of being lonely.
✨Living With Loneliness
If you were blessed with this kind of loneliness, then congrats. You have now been diagnosed as a forever lonely person. When you have learned to live with this feeling, it never goes away. In moments where the silence sounds the same as it did in the thick of it, you will feel that lingering presence. Loneliness will become the ghost that haunts wherever you go, a spirit of someone you used to know too well. People tend to sense it in you, avoiding you when they can and only interacting with you if they have to. It becomes a trait about you that your friends drop like pennies when they talk about you. “Oh, her? She just likes being alone!” My friend smiles while she explains why I’m not at a party she’s thrown three years in a row. But the truth is, I couldn’t leave. The thought of forcing myself into a space that feels so consumed by energy that doesn’t want me there suffocates me enough to pass out. Sleeping past the time the party was supposed to start, and then I wake up by the time everyone is too drunk to remember the secrets they spill. And I’m reminded why making loneliness a trait of mine pays off in the end.
But with all of these things combined, the biggest thing for me is the constant need for understanding. Wondering if there are people that think or feel the same way I do and did. If it was a youngest daughter or absent father syndrome, I have always searched for something to pin it on or someone to know how it feels. But at the same time, I wouldn’t wish for someone to understand this loneliness because I know what it took to get here. When I say there are good things about my loneliness, it doesn’t mean that I chose to be lonely. It’s just that when you know you’ll live with a feeling forever, it is easier to rationalize it. You pick out the good parts of bad things because if you have to deal with it, it might as well be the bright side of things. It might be confusing to some, but I’m sure if you’ve ever been lonely, you’d understand.
* Make sure to follow us on Substack and Tumblr for blog posts, as well as, other fun content! Leave a like, comment, and share with friends as we'd appreciate that a bunch. Be on the look out for weekly content and we hope to see you soon! *
https://substack.com/?https://thedotcomdiaries.tumblr.com
09/26/2025
09/22/2025
09/13/2025
08/31/2025
06/01/2025