On Loneliness

Why it’s embarrassing to admit and why it’s normal when you leave everything you know

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My first day in Australia

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“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

-       PG Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

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So I don’t know anybody, and rectifying this is not as easy as it might seem. Both may be a direct result of recently having moved to Australia, where I know nobody in the literal sense, several weeks ago. Also not so easy is writing about loneliness without sliding elaborately onto a Victorian fainting couch of self-pity (because, frankly, yuck), rolling in it indulgently like a muck-wallowing pig, or just sounding like a bit of a sentimental dreck-peddler. I remember the loneliness of my adolescence, watching my peers apparently connect with one another and not getting how they did that. I was on the perimeter smelling weird and being intense about Jane Austen (not a killer social move in the Ireland of the early 2000s, or indeed now).

Other people seemed to know what they were doing without feeling like someone who had wandered out of bed only to find themselves onstage in a performance of Singin’ in the Rain when they can’t sing or dance and don’t know any of the lines and they thought Gene Kelly often seemed to conflate good teeth with acting proficiency, actually. Of course now I know that while we all vary in levels of extraversion and interest in Jane Austen, no teenager ‘knew what they were doing’. They all kind of hated themselves while secretly suspecting they might be an undiscovered genius who possibly could not age or die, and they all smelt like cat food if they skipped a shower. They were largely all vulnerable and socially inept, but of course, as in adulthood, there are levels.

I was lonely then, and I’m lonely now. How you write that without appearing to feel sorry for yourself or more than a little pathetic, I haven’t quite figured out. You’ll simply have to take my word for it – I don’t feel sorry for myself. But I do feel lonely, and I’m a smidge embarrassed to admit it because I understand somewhere in my guts that we aren’t supposed to say that. It alienates people somehow. It’s a word we reserve for twitchy incels who consider changing into fresh underwear daily just more evidence of the feminisation of everything, and for very elderly people shivering, forgotten, next to space heaters in unlit houses in a tv appeal for charitable donations.

It’s a word for people we consider as having been passed by. By the people around them. By the world. Loneliness is seen as a socially evolved response to irrelevance. It happens to people we stop seeing. To people we cut loose because they’re difficult – or undesirable – to connect with. I think this may be why we tend to feel an aversion for those who admit to being lonely. Some part of us looks for reasons why, really, it’s their own fault. The market responding to low value, as though nobody wants to buy what these weirdos are selling.

I have some sympathy for that argument. I still feel intense about Jane Austen (if less so). I smell better these days –  I swear. I’m conscious that the world has not yet passed me by. I have human connection here on Substack – lots of it. I have people in different parts of the world I can call or message. I have a husband who is a foot and a half taller than I am and will gather me into an unbelievably comforting hug pretty much on request. It’s a bit like hugging a friendly bear who thinks you’re great, and consequently blissful. Still, something is missing.

In 2018, after first moving to London and a few months into my new life, I was struggling to figure out how I fit into it. I wrote an article in The Irish Times about not having many friends and not being sure what to do about it, or whether it even constituted a problem. Come to think of it, I wasn’t entirely sure what constituted a ‘friend’ at all. I’m still unsure. Yes – I know. This, again, is why everyone hates philosophers. These sorts of questions are appealing only to a very narrow pool of potential future friends. A philosopher quite literally wouldn’t know a friend for sure if they were standing in front of us recreating the love declaration scene from Love Actually. I’ve taken creative licence there. Nobody has ever declared undying forbidden romantic love for a philosopher. Conceivably Spinoza, but apart from him (and perhaps Kierkegaard and de Beauvoir. Frantz Fanon. Max Stirner maybe? It’s the glasses), there really isn’t a looker in the bunch.

‘I don’t have many friends’ was such a taboo statement to commit to writing in a newspaper – apparently – that I ended up on Irish national radio accounting for my friendlessness to then-Late Late Show host and Irish media darling Ryan Tubridy. Tubridy seems like the type of person whose connections and high profile would attract a lot of friends, though I didn’t hear all that many publicly defending him in the midst of the recent RTÉ pay scandal which inflamed the nation of Ireland. It resulted in the national broadcaster playing a half-hearted game of ‘Ship of Theseus’ by shedding its skin of key old guard figures, Tubridy among them. This perhaps lends credence to the theory that most of us have only a handful of die-hard friends if we’re lucky.

At the time of the radio interview, the article was described as “a brave admission” as though I was committing the written equivalent of showing the country a weird rash I found somewhere embarrassing in the hope that a diagnosis and eventual treatment might be found if we could only brainstorm the problem together. It gave me the sense that these sorts of five-minute media interviews generally do – of both exploiting and being exploited somehow, so that I leave the experience feeling both wrung out and as though I’ve made the world a slightly worse place. As though I’ve taken something complex and beaten it flat, making it so flimsy it’s fit only for garish decoration, like gold leaf.  The knowledge that all this has been done to squash in a radio ad for tyres just makes it worse.

The conversation around the article made it clear that I should probably feel embarrassed for admitting to having only a small number of friends, and so then I was, a bit. I was also irked and wrestled with the strong sense that surely –surely – it is perfectly unremarkable to emigrate and feel lonely. Surely it is a situation replicated constantly under varied conditions across the globe. Losing friends when they die, when they move, when they take a different route in life – or you do – so that whatever brought you together in the first place is no longer there between you. When they change, or you change as hopefully we all do, and the change isn’t compatible. There are different types of friendships. Some linked to activities, or places, interests, times, or events in the course of your life. Some disembodied and intellectual. Some forming from an intense commonality and recognition on both sides, and then for whatever reason, fading away.

So I have friends, but not all that many. I have just left a job where I was surrounded by people – sociable, gregarious people with almost inconceivably sensational hair, but often felt disconnected in their midst. I don’t have connection here in Australia yet, and that does feel lonely. It should, really.  Because loneliness can be the absence of any company, sure, but that’s a relatively crude interpretation. Ultimately, loneliness is feeling unseen. It is not no interaction with others, but superficial interaction – the knowledge that you are invisible to one another even as you interact. It is the awareness that one or other of you – maybe both – is conceived by the other as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. So you can seek people out arbitrarily, yes. You can take a pottery or a gym class and it may (hopefully) keep you from becoming the incel in three-day-old jocks, but you might still feel lonely. You might feel as though you’re on that stage, performing clumsily just to get blindly through the moment. Until you see someone who sees you back.