The Loneliness Project
MY JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN LONELINESS
My journey through American loneliness.
WHEN I set out to write a book about loneliness, I imagined it would be easy. Loneliness seemed simple: It was a bad feeling, but it was also romantic in some way, a problem that novels and movies had trained me to believe was an intellectual one that afflicted writers and artists, alone for too long with their thoughts in their cluttered apartments and their underappreciated ideas. I was coming off the publication of my first book, Imagine Wanting Only This, which had taken me nearly a decade to finish, though in many ways—as with all first books—it had taken my whole life and felt like a distillation of everything I’d ever thought or felt. Which is to say, it was messier than what I wanted to write next, and more personal. My first book was a memoir, so I wanted to write my second book about something outside myself completely—something universal. What was more universal than loneliness?
The book proposal I sent to my agent, Jin Auh, outlined a book that catalogued the loneliness I observed in others, with context provided by the piles of scientific data I’d found through the markedly casual research of a new project, data that coolly reported that loneliness was killing us. It felt good to have numbers to point to, next to a quote from the U.S. surgeon general about how loneliness was one of America’s most pressing health risks. I copy and pasted the quote into a Word doc titled “New Book Notes.” The science of loneliness—which outlined quite clearly that loneliness was multiplying rapidly and growing more dire each decade—also gave me context and reassurance that what I was feeling was, if not healthy, at least normal. I was prone to loneliness, it should probably go without saying, and was in a particularly lonely spell when I began to think critically about what the feeling actually was. But I wasn’t interested in writing a book about my own loneliness—I wanted to create a book that looked wistfully toward an isolated world, or a book that I didn’t have to participate in as I had in my memoir. I didn’t want to write or draw myself as a character, because I was tired of writing and drawing about myself. I thought of the loneliness project
like a glossy stopgap, as if I’d spend a leisurely year or two on some essays before I geared up to write and draw a graphic capital-N novel, which I’d been told for years was what I should create in order to be a real capital-W writer with sales figures that wouldn’t seem quite so mocking.
But when I showed drafts to friends and trusted readers, the feedback was all the same: Where are you in this? What about your loneliness? My early drafts were gluts of the data I was fascinated by: Loneliness increases your cholesterol! College freshmen who were lonely got the flu more often! Lonely people perceive the room temperature to be colder than non–lonely people! Everything I was learning was so strange, and so eerily fascinating, and I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t as satisfying to early readers as it was to me. I was pairing the internal narrator of my own mind with the data I was learning, but it wasn’t until I finally came to terms with writing into my loneliest moments, or my biggest hopes for community—or, God forbid, love—that the book I already thought I was writing actually started to become one.
If there is one thing I can say I’ve learned to be unequivocally true in my life as a writer and a person thus far, it’s that everything takes longer than I think it will. The beginning of a book project is all possibility, or all promise: You haven’t yet uncovered the problems you’ll spend the next several years taking apart amid the gloom of your laptop while lines slowly etch themselves across your forehead and suddenly become permanent. The slowness of writing is also its pleasure, though, because it’s where you become better. The person you are when you finish a book is a person who is smarter than the one who started it, if you’ve truly taken your time. In the case of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, I’m grateful that the book I made was so much harder than the one I’d planned to write, because writing a book about loneliness made me a less lonely person. So often I had thought of loneliness as something shameful, or as a personal flaw—if I wasn’t fulfilled, wasn’t that my fault? Didn’t it suggest that I was needy or annoying
or unlovable? It was only through looking at loneliness closely that I learned it was everywhere, and that it was something we shouldn’t turn away from, but listen to. I won’t pretend to truly understand loneliness or how to solve its problems, but I do know that by looking at it so intensely, I have come to recognize its value. If we let it, loneliness can bring us closer together. That’s why we’re built to feel lonely at all.