When you feel lost and alone

Irecently spoke to someone who indicated how low and so alone they feel, such that she now uses sleeping pills daily just to at least get some sleep. I realised how we all we sometimes feel lost and alone in our lives. Life has suddenly become such a struggle to the point that you don’t even feel like waking up to face each day. Everything around us seems to be giving us hints that we have failed in life or other people are out there living and we are just stagnant. If you are social media user, opening Facebook or Instagram makes you feel so sad, anxious and unhappy. You end up feeling like you don’t have an awesome enough life, its like if like you feel as if you don’t have a glamorous life to photograph and share, you suddenly feel like your life is not up to standard and it sucks.

What you fail to acknowledge is that people share the highlights, not the lowlights. I’ve talked with so many people whose lives look amazing on Facebook and Instagram who tell me, “I feel sad. I feel like no one cares. I feel alone.” So whenever you feel intimidated by what people share on social media, know that it is just a façade. Always It’s okay to be right where you are. Sometimes we think we need to be making progress and moving forward, that we need to be a shining ray of light all the time. But the truth is, we need times when we’re pausing.

Those times are often when we feel more lost and alone. We’re figuring things out, re-evaluating what we thought we wanted. It helps to let ourselves rest in the knowledge that this time is natural and normal, rather than tell ourselves we need to be making progress and moving forward.

The Mess

Change happens in the mess. The truth is that we often can’t feel better until we have a little meltdown or even a big one. Change means shifting into something different, and to do that we may need to let go of some things and allow them melt away. This can get messy. Sometimes you must let go of the thought that you need to be what everyone else thinks you should be. You should know that in everything there are new beginnings and often new beginnings can feel like endings. Do you remember a time when you started something new? A new school year? A new summer break? A new relationship? I bet if you look back, you’ll recognise that there was an ending that happened before that new beginning. And during that ending you might have been sad and felt alone. But eventually, those feelings transformed when the ending gave way to a new beginning.

The harder we fight the way we are feeling, the harder it is to feel that way. The more we let it be there, the easier it gets to feel that way. The feeling no longer feels scary, or like something we need to try to avoid. And often, as a result, the feeling will fade away. Sometimes quickly. But resisting the feeling can make it feel bigger and harder to handle.

Being alone can bring you peace. When we are alone, we are faced with our feelings and our thoughts. It’s harder to distract ourselves. If we let these times of feeling lost and alone be all that they can be messy, uncomfortable and hard but we can learn to handle them. We can learn that they don’t need to be avoided. And that helps us feel stronger, like we can handle anything, and that can bring us peace.

Lost and Alone

All the emotions that arise when we feel lost and alone can point to what we need to heal within ourselves. They can be like signposts on the road to freedom, saying, “Look over here. Go this way. The sadness I felt at some point in my life when I felt most alone was pointing my attention toward expectations I had of myself, at that point I thought that I had to be in a relationship in order to be happy, that I had to be busy and socialising all of the time in order to be like other people, that I had to live an exciting-allthe-time life.

Letting go of those expectations helped me heal those misunderstandings within myself. Without the sadness, I wouldn’t have spotted them. So whatever that you are also going through It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. Accepting that life is kind of unkind sometimes can help us get through the times where we feel lost and alone. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you.

It’s just part of being alive. The sun will come out tomorrow, I know it might actually rain.

But what will happen for sure is that a new day will dawn. And in the dawn of a new day, you might feel better. Also, be gentle.

Be soft. Be caring. We’re all in this together. And there are other people who feel exactly the same way. So take it easy whenever you feel alone, know you are definitely not alone.

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