Maybe there’s a silver lining out of this year
‘Irealised this year that I have no friends,’’ came the text, ‘‘and over lockdown I didn’t speak to anyone really. No-one checked in.’’ The honesty of the caller’s admission reached through the air waves, seized me by the throat and squeezed until my eyes stung. We were on air at the time and for a full, horrific moment I thought Imight start sobbing on national radio.
‘‘What should I do?’’ the caller asked. The question crackled for amoment in the silence while we all tried to tame the unruly mess of concern, embarrassment, objectivity, practicality and communion with the caller’s admission.
I’ve felt the same ache of loneliness as that caller. I’m four years into my third country move, and I’ve just started feeling like I have real friends here.
But as soon as I heard those words I was back in 2016, sitting on the floor of my bare, bento box apartment, watching the winking, neon chill of Auckland’s night and wondering if your 20s are supposed to feel this empty.
Then the host’s empathetic response cracked me out of it. And then, even more surprisingly, everyone began to pour out their own blisteringly honest experiences of loneliness.
It wasn’t until walking home later that I realised that had never happened before. We don’t talk about loneliness like this.
OK, we may grudgingly concede that old people are lonely and some sad saps don’t have friends. But we rarely admit our loneliness to ourselves, let alone discuss our experiences on live radio.
But here we are. And it’s happened twice more on air in recent weeks. Similarly, over the past few months, I’ve seen the quiet creep of it in the threads, comment boards and advice columns of my midnight scrolling.
‘‘This year,’’ whispers the internet, ‘‘we realised how lonely we are.’’
Could it be that 2020, the rollercoaster of apocalypse and boredom, has a silver lining? Are we actually starting to talk about loneliness honestly?
It would make sense. Before Covid, we resolutely repeated that loneliness was a personal moral failing.
If you were lonely, the logic went, it was your fault and there was something wrong with you. Unless you were old, when death killed off your friends, you were either weird, shy, or nasty.
Anyone who’s ever been lonely knows that it’s often none of these things – and yetwe all had to pretend it was, or become objects of shame and embarrassment ourselves.
(Although admittedly loneliness does manifest itself in weird behaviour. I remember crying once in the supermarket because I felt that the can labelled ‘‘Soup for one’’ was sneering at me.)
But then 2020 happened. Firstly, it showed us how much loneliness is influenced by our external circumstances. Having a daily small routine of places to go and things to do helps you feel connected to something.
And the loss of work colleagues, morning commutes and regular cafe visits showed us that we need these things to feel like we exist – and that our existence actually matters.
If you were lonely, the logic went, it was your fault and there was something wrong with you.
But more profoundly, it showed us you can have heaps of relationships and friendships, and yet still feel alone. We’ve all spent a lot of time looking at our friends, family and partners. (What else is there to do? There’s only so many games of Scrabble in a weekend.)
And many of us have realised that we have friends who are really acquaintances. You know, someone we don’t really care about, who doesn’t care about us either. Some of us have realised that we’ve filled our lives with these people.
Many of us have had the time (so much time) to look at our partners and work out if we’re in love or not.
You may have been with someone for years but been too busy to realise that you’re actually hideously alone in the relationship. Well, 2020 was the year when we realised it.
Not to mention just how rare genuinely meaningful relationships actually are.
And as grim as some of these revelations have been, they have at least smashed apart our old assumptions that loneliness was all our fault.
Instead, we can see now it’s not some moral failing. But rather something circumstantial that we can change. And simply also a part of human existence that we have to live with.