The solution

I used to think I’d made peace with loneliness. Certainly, I had experienced a great deal of it, always at least on some level.

The typical ‘alone in a crowded room’, fake smiles and faux friendships comprised my early schooling. I learned to de-code social cues, to engineer acceptable reactions and to be present whilst never being truly present. I came to view it as the way I would walk through life – never truly understood – and concluded that I myself was fundamentally defective.

As I grew older, my mental health deteriorated. Friendships eroded and instead my eating disorder took their place. It provided predictability and reliability; always present.

Loneliness itself was a stranger to me – though it was in my presence, I didn’t know it. I was never alone with it – never fully cognisant. Though I was deep in it, I lacked the capacity to recognise this.

My eating disorder felt like friendship deeper than I had ever experienced. It was the only consciousness that fully understood me. It knew intricately the workings of my brain and promised me comfort. It kept me company internally, despite the isolation that engulfed me. It kept me busy as my network switched from peers to carers.

After a long and arduous struggle, my physical health stabilised and I returned to school. I had both the company of my anorexia – still as loud as ever – and also once more had the surface-level friendships that ticked all the boxes.

I was more aware of my bone-deep loneliness. Though, being surrounded by others combined with the ever-present thoughts allowed me to deny it.

When my schooling soon after came to an end, the weak friendships I’d held seemed to dissolve almost instantaneously.

I was left alone with my disordered mind. For some time, it provided enough to hold on to. Such that loneliness was kept at bay. However, I began realising that the companionship offered by this part of myself was an illusion, and one that came at a great cost.

I had felt aspects of it before, but I’m never all together. It was not until then that I truly experienced loneliness through multiple lenses.

Alone in my experience, something that no other soul in the universe could comprehend to its entirety.

Alone by space, trapped in my room by bollards of broken connections.

Fighting my head alone, given my eating disorder no longer provided the same momentary solace.

It is a deep, soul-destroying feeling. A darkness that feels so final. Vulnerability and fragility and grief. Envy and longing for the mateship that others found so freely.

But it also allowed me to realise the need for change. It drove me to search for others like myself and in turn to discover the Lived Experience field. A wonderful, wholesome, welcoming and healing community to whom no explanation was needed.

People who bore scars in the same places. People who ease and still ease my pain. People who had known and overcome deep loneliness