Dealing with Loneliness
Last Tuesday I was at a birthday party. Thirty people in a living room, cake on the table, someone had brought balloons. And I watched a woman standing near the kitchen doorway, wine glass in hand, smiling at all the right moments. Laughing when everyone laughed. She looked fine. She looked like she was having a great time.
I know that look. I’ve worn that exact face.
Dealing with loneliness is weird because it has almost nothing to do with how many people are in the room. You can be lonely in a marriage. Lonely at work with forty colleagues. Lonely at Christmas dinner with your entire family passing the potatoes. The room is full and something in your chest is just — not. My therapist once called it “a hunger that food can’t fix” which I thought was a bit much, but she wasn’t wrong.
None of this is new, by the way. That’s the thing that caught me off guard when I started reading about it. We talk about loneliness like it’s a modern epidemic — smartphones, social media, everyone bowling alone or whatever that book was about. But people have been writing about this exact feeling for thousands of years. Before WiFi. Before electricity. Before indoor plumbing. Turns out the empty feeling in your stomach at 2 AM is basically a human universal.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
What follows are four people who lived in completely different centuries, spoke different languages, had wildly different lives. One ran an empire. One never left her house. One was a refugee. One chose to be alone on purpose. All four of them tried to write down what dealing with loneliness actually felt like from the inside. And — this is the part that still surprises me — they basically said the same thing.
“The only journey is the one within.”
Rainer Maria Rilke — 20th-century Bohemian-Austrian poet
Letters to a Young Poet
Rilke is the kind of writer people either love or find insufferable. Fair enough. But here’s what you need to know about him: he chose to be alone for years. Not in a dramatic, throwing-his-phone-in-a-lake way. More like he just kept leaving. Left Prague. Left his wife. Left Paris. Kept putting distance between himself and everyone who cared about him. Not because he didn’t want connection — his letters are almost embarrassingly hungry for it — but because he had this conviction that you can’t actually be close to anyone until you’ve learned to sit in a room by yourself without panicking.
When he was twenty-seven or so, some teenager he’d never met sent him poems and asked for feedback. Rilke wrote back. Then kept writing back. Those letters became this book that’s been passed around for over a century now, usually by people who are going through something. I read it at thirty-two, in a studio apartment, after a breakup. Hit different than I expected.
“Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”
Marcus Aurelius — Meditations, Book IV
OK so Marcus Aurelius. Emperor of Rome. Literally the most powerful human being on the planet at the time. Armies. Palaces. Senators lining up to tell him how great he was. He could have had anyone in a room with him at any moment of any day.
And what did he do at night? Pulled out a notebook — we call it the Meditations now but it was never meant to be published — and wrote about feeling alone. Not sad-alone. More like philosophically alone. He’d figured out this thing that takes most people half a lifetime: being surrounded by people who need you is a completely different experience from being known by someone. Those are not the same thing. Not even a little.
He didn’t try to fix it, which is the part I find weirdly helpful. He just described dealing with loneliness the way you’d describe the weather. It’s there. It’s real. It’s not going anywhere. Now what are you going to do with all this quiet?
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“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
Kahlil Gibran — The Prophet
Gibran moved from Lebanon to Boston when he was twelve. Twelve! Try being twelve in a country where you can’t read the street signs and your lunch smells weird to the other kids and your mom is cleaning houses because her medical degree doesn’t count here. He learned English, sure. Became a famous writer, even. But there’s this thing that happens when you immigrate young — you end up with two half-languages. Your Arabic gets rusty. Your English is never quite right. You belong to two places and neither one fully claims you.
His line about pain breaking the shell of your understanding — you see it on Pinterest now with watercolour backgrounds, which is kind of funny. He wasn’t writing something for a poster. He was trying to describe a very particular kind of feeling lonely, the kind where you’re at a dinner table and everyone’s speaking a language you technically understand but the jokes land wrong and the references go over your head. You’re physically present. Emotionally, you’re still in the mountains somewhere, wondering when you get to go back.
Emily Dickinson didn’t leave her house for the last twenty years of her life. People turn this into a quirky fun fact — “oh, the reclusive poet in the white dress!” — but think about that for a minute. Twenty years. She watched the world from her bedroom window. Wrote almost eighteen hundred poems. Published maybe seven while she was alive. The rest they found in a drawer when she died, tied up in little bundles with string.
She chose it. I think that’s important. Nobody locked her in. But choosing something doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, and when you read what she wrote about loneliness you realise she knew exactly what it cost. That poem — the one about a solitude worse than death — isn’t metaphor. It’s measurement. She was mapping the shape of her own isolation the way a surveyor maps land. No romance about it. Just precision. I think about that sometimes, when loneliness feels like something I should be embarrassed about. Dickinson wasn’t embarrassed. She was taking notes.
“There is a solitude of space, a solitude of sea, a solitude of death — but these are company compared with that profounder site, that polar privacy, a soul admitted to itself.”
Emily Dickinson — American poet, 1830–1886
Poem 1695
What connects them all
What They All Understood
So here’s what I notice when I put these four side by side. Rilke, Aurelius, Gibran, Dickinson — none of them tried to escape it. That’s the through line. Everyone I know, myself included, treats loneliness like a fire alarm. Something’s wrong! Fix it! Call someone! Get on a dating app! And maybe that works sometimes, I don’t know. But these four — from completely different centuries, in completely different circumstances — all arrived at the same uncomfortable place: the loneliness isn’t a malfunction. It’s more like a room in your house you forgot you had. Dark, yes. Cold, definitely. But yours.
I’m not saying that’s comforting, exactly. It’s not a hug. But there’s something in knowing that dealing with loneliness has never been about finding more people or being more interesting or fixing whatever you think is broken in you. It’s about changing your relationship with the quiet. And that’s been true for two thousand years. Probably longer.
Before you go
A Moment for You
If tonight is one of those nights — Tuesday, nothing on TV, phone on the table, no one to call — I’m not going to tell you it’s fine. That would be patronising and also a lie. But maybe it helps, just a little, to know that a Roman emperor and a Lebanese immigrant and a poet who never left her bedroom and a writer who couldn’t stop leaving — all four of them sat in the same silence. You’re not broken. You’re in old, old company.
If you want to sit with these thoughts a while longer, at your own pace — InnerCalm+ is there for that. No rush.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.
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