My mum, a lighthouse for the lost and lonely

My mum has a habit of finding people. Not in the private detective way – she’s way too fond of rainbow polka dots to pass undercover in a crowd – but more in her Peter Pan ability to attract lost souls. I used to wander off in the supermarket and return to find her holding the babies of strung-out strangers while they sobbed into her shoulder. Or I’d come home to find her in a blitz of tulle, pinning a wedding dress on to a random lady whom she’d met in the charity shop that morning. Or I’d watch her making curry to take to the lady from church with no money and four kids at Christmas.

I’ve been thinking about her a lot recently. Firstly because she spilled that curry in her car, which is now my car, and it still stinks stubbornly of butter chicken on hot days like we’ve had recently.

But mostly it’s because all of these people Mum helped stick in my mind because they were lonely. Maybe they were old, or they’d just moved countries, or they’d had loved ones die. But they exuded the particular, paralytic, quiet hopelessness of loneliness.

Loneliness has been in the news a lot recently. I argued last week that part of Jordan Peterson’s appeal was to a new wave of lost and lonely men. We already know the statistics that last year

650,000 Kiwis felt lonely over a month, with

15-24-year-olds being the most affected. Further research released this week suggested that 75 per cent of Kiwi women feel ‘‘unloved’’, which is a close cousin of loneliness. And you don’t need me to tell you again how appallingly bad our nation’s mental health, isolation and depression statistics are.

So I think it’s safe to say we’re lonely people. The real question is, given we all know the statistics, why are we so bad at actually doing anything about this?

Of course it starts with us being hideously ashamed of it. It feels way more acceptable to talk about being depressed these days than to admit being lonely. At least attitudes towards depression have advanced to a point where we recognise that depression isn’t necessarily about you being messed up – it’s your neurochemistry that’s messed up. But we still treat loneliness like a huge neon billboard saying that something is deeply, nastily, fundamentally wrong with you as a human.

I find it deeply embarrassing to admit to being lonely. It feels like it’s proof that I’m actually some sort of secret social pariah who chews their toes and flashes strangers in parks. I’m not, promise; I’ve had times of crippling loneliness which have nothing to do with a secret fondness for harassing strangers.

Like the year I started on the Paul Henry Show.

I moved back to New Zealand at two weeks’ notice, had one real friend here and a bunch of high school ‘‘mates’’ who now made a point of telling me I was a stuck-up bitch. Plus I got up every day at 3am and went to bed at 6pm – not the way to have a thriving social life, and it was made worse by everyone telling me I must be having the time of my life.

It turned out fine eventually, but is it any wonder we’re bad at addressing loneliness if we can’t even admit it in ourselves?

Of course it’s complicated by the fact that there are multiple ways to be lonely. One is social loneliness, like when you move countries or get older, and you don’t have the people you’ve always loved and been with.

TWe still treat loneliness like a huge neon billboard saying that something is deeply, nastily, wrong with you asa human.

hat’s hard to cure because it relies on you, the sad human, looking for new people to find and love. And we’re not always good at things like that, not in the least because it’s tough making friends as an adult, but also because loneliness can also make you difficult to talk to.

It might make you needy, or angry, or quiet. And these are all awkward, socially uncomfortable things for a potential friendly person to get over. They require the kind of rare relentless friendliness, one that’s not easily intimidated, that Mum has.

And then there’s deeper, existential loneliness that can creep in even when you’re surrounded by friends and relationships.

That’s a real hard one to solve, because it’s fundamentally a desire to feel understood and connected deeply to another person. And that’s an enormously ambitious topic to solve in itself, let alone in an 800-word column.

So while people like Mum, these lighthouses for lost souls, aren’t going to solve our need for deep human connection, maybe we could take something from the mantra of relentless, compassionate friendliness. It’s not going to fix everything, but it makes daily life a much softer experience.