Project brings us together in our isolation
How many ways can we be lonely? As many ways as we can be human is probably the best answer. Socially, from childhood to old age, there are so many ways to be lonely I can’t list them all.
We can be lonely in search of love, when we’re in a relationship or just breaking up.
We can be lonely at work — our job isn’t the right fit, or no one, it seems, has our back.
We can be immigrants and feel as though we don’t fit in. We can feel lonely because we don’t have enough friends or, if we’re elderly, that our friends have gone. We feel lonely when we’re left out of social events and certainly we feel lonely in front of our screens, spending precious hours life-watching on Facebook instead of living in the real world.
Toronto graphic designer Marissa Korda, 25, launched a timely and empathic mission around loneliness last month, one she hopes will create both more empathy and an ongoing community to discuss what some experts are calling a “loneliness epidemic.”
“There aren’t enough spaces for people to talk about loneliness — at all,” Korda told me in an interview.
Korda’s the Loneliness Project — thelonelinessproject.org — is a Google forum where anyone can anonymously submit their own story of being lonely.
They can use their real first names, create another name or just be “Anonymous.” She has no idea who any of them are. Maybe her friends. Maybe someone she saw on transit this morning.
So far she’s received almost 700 stories — all of them not only wrenching but recognizable. More than 7,000 people have visited the site. Here are a few examples:
Daniel, 18: “Loneliness lives in my stomach constantly and I can feel it eating all my organs with each week that passes. It’s like a parasite.”
Maisa, 28: “I feel lonely when I hear people talking about immigrants in a particular way, because I am an immigrant, even though I don’t look like what people perceive an immigrant to be.”
Jeanette, 36, describing the last time she felt lonely: “Coming home from a disappointing date.”
AJ, 74, who remembers first feeling lonely “as a child, realizing that almost everyone else had siblings — I had none.”
And Andrew, who at 24 experienced an almost iconic lonely moment when he “spent two hours alone wandering around an Ikea because I was too nervous to ask people to come with me. I ate two hotdogs and bought nothing.” I hear you, Andrew. Korda called for submissions on Facebook more than five months before she launched the site, and was amazed at how many people actually submitted stories and answered her six questions, instead of just “liking” the project.
“It’s just so much easier to quickly like something, but the fact that the stories outweighed the likes really underscores the stigma around loneliness — it was like people didn’t want to associate themselves publicly with even the concept.”
More women have submitted than men. And because Korda is a millennial, she paid particular attention to stories from her own generation, captured in one of the first posts from Lily, age 24, who wrote: “Loneliness to me is not knowing which direction to step and watching those around me walk miles ahead without looking back.”
Some of the descriptions are piercingly particular — walking alone at Harbourfront and realizing you are the only one without someone; seeing your roommate on campus walk by with a bunch of friends, while you are wistfully alone; having no one come to cheer you on during a marathon.
The graphics of Korda’s website put you viscerally in touch with loneliness — little apartment windows, all numbered, where you click on the number to read the story.
For Korda, the visual of the city was “very powerful — there’s a “special kind of loneliness in the city. We’re constantly surrounded by people but we’re in our own little weird bubbles, our own silos, we have to put up walls.”
The Loneliness Project came about because Korda’s boss, Lesli Ferguson, encourages her employees to pursue a “passion project,” one that can even be done on company time as long as the real work is getting done. (Bosses, listen up: a passion project is a wonderful idea.)
While the Loneliness Project is ongoing, Korda is already thinking of several more, including the Guilt Project. Bet there will be a tsunami of submissions for that one.
Korda found after reading the loneliness stories, “I approach my own loneliness differently — I don’t feel so alone.”
I had two reactions: I wanted to fix everyone’s loneliness, or at least connect them to people who could. (There are suitable social services listed on the site.)
But it also made me remember some of the most profoundly lonely periods in my own life, and understand we do experience shame about being lonely. We also don’t realize that with only a few small changes, our lives can be so much better.
The site, as far as I can see, doesn’t deal with recovery from loneliness. It also strikes me as ironic that these confessions are being submitted and read online, where so many people spend too much time instead of pursing face to face contact.
But that’s not the point. The point is to acknowledge a universal and growing loneliness — in ourselves and others — and take it from there. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues.