You Deserve to Feel Lonely, This is Why

One can be alone, in their own company, and feel entirely connected and at peace with the world, just as one can be in a crowd and feel miserably lonely — Epictetus

Photo by Diego San on Unsplash

There’s probably not a more desperate feeling than being in a room full of people and feeling completely alone.

I feel this way all the time. A wallflower. Observer, great listener, but hardly existing in anyone else’s world. I feel like this at home, out and about, wherever and with whomever. Always on the outside looking in.

I feel it a lot, and you might too if you’re reading this, for various reasons. We’re still living in a pandemic and if you have children, the feeling of loneliness may be intensified because you keep them safe by staying home and they are all you have to talk to and they need snacks like you need human interaction. Ah, the “new normal,” yay.

It also probably doesn’t help that we’re all “burned out” and every article you scroll by is another article confirming that we are all, in fact, “burned out”, but at least we’re all in it together.

If I’m honest, I was burned out well before the pandemic. I live rurally, moved after having my first child to this place in the woods without knowing hardly a soul. It’s hard making friends as an adult, which I did not know — and it’s harder when you have kids to juggle. I left a seriously busy social life in Nashville and moved to the mountains — what was I thinking? (Another story for another time.)

I’ve chalked up my feelings of being lonely into feeling bad for myself. “No friends, what’s wrong with me?” Between having four children and living where I live, then going head first into a pandemic, there really hasn’t been a lot of time for me to make friends, and then, I’m not great a being social in teh first place, so inserting myself is rather tough. And then, who has time anyway?

I’ve come to terms that I have a lot of children, suffer from anxiety and depression, and recently, I’m embracing the fact that I deserve to be and feel alone.

You’re probably thinking, “that’s weird and she must be on her way to starting another pity party (I did just admit to that above) and I should…