This week, I realized that I am lonely.
The loneliness did not come on all of a sudden. It crept in slowly—as friends moved away, as I quit a club that I’d been a part of for nearly a decade, and as I withdrew into my solitary work as a writer as deadlines came fast and hard.
As an author, I spend most of my work life working alone. Most of the time, I don’t mind at all. As Susan Sontag wrote, “One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.”
Whether we are authors, architects, or attorneys, solitude gives us time to contemplate and to listen to our imaginations.
But alone time and loneliness are not the same. Alone time can be generative. Loneliness is destructive.
Whether you work alone at home or in a busy office, you can feel lonely. And loneliness, as researchers know, can cause depression. Feeling lonely can become a self-reinforcing cycle, which causes a person to feel even more lonely—even isolated.
As I define it (from research and experience), isolation and loneliness are not the same. Isolation is far worse. Isolation is loneliness without hope.
Psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller and her fellow researcher psychologist Irene Stiver once wrote about the psychological damage that isolation can cause: “We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation.”
They write that isolation is “a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation.”
As I experienced over the past year or so, the path is........