Hi, Friends!
I’ll never forget the zoom I had with a young woman who changed my understanding of loneliness. I went into the call with beginner’s mind because I’ve learned (through error) that the only safe assumption about people’s experience is that I don’t know anything until they tell me. But I was still amazed when she started unfolding the layers of her loneliness:
She was lonely at work because she’d made a mistake on her resume and feared someone was going to find out—so she kept her guard up at all times.
She was feeling isolated from her friends back home who hadn’t shared the same experiences of growing and changing, but they still, of all people knew her best.
She felt like she didn’t belong with her cultural group in the US either because she had become too “Americanized” to them.
She struggled with being a good friend to herself.
She didn’t know how to fit in socializing with new people due to work/school demands.
And she was anticipating loneliness moving back home to caretake for aging parents.
The lesson: Her experience did not fall neatly into one of three kinds of loneliness that are sometimes named: existential, emotional + social. Neither did it map onto the Surgeon General’s proposed breakdown: intimate, relational, collective. It was its own, living thing that needed to be handled on its own terms.
What if I would have insisted on shoe-horning her experience into one of these categories? What if I would have attached a pamphlet in the chat encouraging her to make more eye contact, do community service + text someone that she’s grateful for them? That would be ABSURD.
So instead, I said, “Whoa.” And just took it all in with her. “Makes sense you’re feeling overwhelmed. That is a lot, on lots of levels, all at once.”
She sighed. “Yeah.”
“Ok, so where do you feel like you want to start?” I asked. Partly because there is no “objective” starting point—only the one someone feels able and motivated to move from. But also because I truly believe that we must give people the reigns on their own paths while being the best co-pilots possible.
“I don’t know,” she said, thinking.
I let her think. But didn’t want her to get stressed thinking there was a “right” place to start.
“You know, it doesn’t really matter, because your life is all linked up. So anywhere you start and make some progress, it will positively affect the other areas, too,” I said.
“Ok, well, I guess I want to think about what to do with my friends back home, especially knowing that I’m going back soon,” she said.
And so that was our starting point on her belonging frontier. She had named many contours of her experience. She had been kind to herself in her process. She made insights as she spoke. She had a plan for a next step to explore how her friendships might be re-started on new terms when she got home.
I realized that though the general emotional makeup of loneliness is similar (more on that next time), there are infinite varieties of forms it takes within a life, let alone across different people’s lives. And that this is a thing, not to be afraid of because we can’t “contain” it in nice buckets, but to be in awe of.
Now I make a practice of looking into people’s eyes in the same way we look into the night sky. If you stand still, you may start to see their constellation of loneliness emerge from the depth of years.
Series Plan:
For the next several letters I want to explore the varieties of loneliness with you all. This feels urgent to me because in public discourse loneliness is being talked about as a singular, menacing and elusive force. This simply doesn’t reflect the nature and possibilities of loneliness. It turns it into one monolithic enemy that we need to “combat” and “eradicate.” It misdirects our responses. And the more those responses fail, the more overwhelming loneliness feels.
5 questions to help us name our varieties of loneliness:
If your lonelinesses formed a constellation, what would the points be?
What are you experiencing loneliness around right now that you weren’t last year?
What has loneliness been teaching you in this season?
When does loneliness tend to visit and how do you know when it leaves?
Does loneliness have friends that it brings with it? (sadness, fear, etc.)
3 Boots-on-the-ground ways to bring this into our communities
If you’d like to experiment in your community around the varieties of loneliness, feel free to adapt the following and let me know how it goes!
On the street: Acts of Belonging
A mini group of us did an act of belonging on campus last year handing out free flowers at a busy intersection. It was our way to acknowledge that everyone is walking around with some form of loneliness in their backpack + in need of a reminder that life is still simultaneously beautiful. We didn’t directly ask people anything about loneliness. And yet, some people told us about their experience anyway. The flowers did all the work here.
In digital spaces: Varieties of Loneliness prompt
Post this to invite people to share publicly or even just reflect privately.
Within your programming:
At a national conference for spiritual leaders in higher ed, we created an 18-station, immersive “Belonging Space,” where Varieties of Loneliness was 1 station. We set up a bunch of single stem flowers in individual vases on the left side of the table, then on the right, we had one large, empty vase. We invited people to tag the single stem flowers with their variety of loneliness, then place it in the communal vase. This ritual gave dignity, beauty and place to our individual and shared experiences. Free printable downloads below:
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Thanks for reading and especially to my paid subscribers who make this work possible. As always, let me know your thoughts or how I can support you.
Take Care,
Cat