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“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

Jonathan Safran Foer

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. 

Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. 

Franz Kafka, “Letters to Milena”

four things that are true at the same time:

once you control for things like ethnicity and socio-economic status, “male loneliness” is not statistically more likely than “female loneliness”. in fact, white women are more likely to be lonely than white men — but this is not statistically significant in all studies. particularly note that the loneliness is worst amongst the disabled, regardless of gender

the loneliness felt by black men and queer men (and other men within minority groups) is likely of a different nature than the loneliness felt by other groups, and so probably requires different solutions

we are all lonely at the moment at higher rates than ever before, regardless of identity, and creating conflict about who is loneliest doesn’t help that. in fact, I’d wager that these kinds of debates probably make it worse

if you want people to stop feeling so lonely, you need to work on making them feel less alienated from the world. and a lot of us are doing an awful job at that at the moment

Safia Elhillo, from Alone, Home Is Not a Country

they should invent a human interaction that doesn't feel like chalkboard scraping

Sonia Sulaiman, from Muneera and the Moon: Stories Inspired by Palestinian Folklore; “Muneera and the Moon”

The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

Does anyone else feel lonesome?

Not lonely. Not alone. Just... lonesome. Like you don't feel connected to anyone. Like you never feel that you will find anyone that understands you, that will see you truly, let alone someone who will even like you. You see friends everywhere, but you don't see yourself in their place, like that is not for you, like you're not made for that and that's not made for you. You see people having fun and laughing and dancing and getting drunk and falling in love and you just... don't feel that for yourself. Like you're not supposed to have that, like you can't because it's not for you and you're not for it.

Like you're supposed to be seeing all these beautiful things in the world but not experience them yourself. Like you want to experience so much, experience everything, but be overwhelmed by it so you don't do any of it.

Like you want to be everywhere and do everything, but you don't belong anywhere and can't do anything. Like you're not supposed to be here. Not in a self-deprecating way but in an incongruous way. You want to live you want to be alive, but you feel you're not supposed to be. Not here at least, not like this. Just a presence in the world, not an active member of it. Even your body doesn't feel like home, your face isn't a face you recognise, like you're not supposed to have either. Like you're just supposed to be.

Like you're supposed to observe, but not experience.

"And the sad part is I was getting better.

And now I'm not"

I need you to love me more, love enough to drown it out (mitski)

― Stevie Smith, Richard Siken, Ana Lucía Ceballos Cáceres, Emily Palermo, Katrien de Blauwer, Natalie Diaz, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Natalie Wee, Jenny Slate

I hope my absence brings you the peace that my love couldn’t

Edward Hopper

etchings, 1921, on wove paper, signed in pencil