What Is Loneliness

What is loneliness? What it is officially is alone; solitary; without company; companionless. But for me, it’s more than that. To me, it’s more than being without a person, because you can feel so alone with the weight of the world on your shoulders with a room of people. Even with people you love or trust you can feel so lonely, like you're longing for some unknown thing.

It’s a weird empty feeling in the pit of your stomach that tells you something isn’t right, that something is missing. That’s the worst thing though. Because you don’t know what’s missing. You don’t know if it’s a person or something like your soul. Whatever is missing just leaves a big hole in your chest that no amount of friends or food or anything will fix.

It’s also an intense sadness. It feels like nothing will ever come and fix it, that that thing that’s missing won’t ever come back. No amount of personal contact or distractions or anything will fix it. That lonely feeling takes over your life. It makes everything less exciting. It dulls the world to slow grey molasses.

Everything is slower, duller, and colder. It sucks the fun out of everything. This ache destroys everything you loved or cared about. It makes all those things seem as interesting as watching beige paint dry. My favorite things in the world are now menial tasks to keep my already bored and lonely mind at ease for a minute or two.

Living with loneliness isn’t easy. It truly takes everything you have and ruins it. Sure, there are moments that seem happy and normal paced and the smallest bit warmer, but they come and go. For now, until you find that thing that fills the hole in your chest, your world is in black and white. No color, no sound, no action, nothing but infinite blank space. You will get bored easily; nothing can keep your attention for very long. You would have to force yourself to get up and eat something every day because if you don’t, you won’t eat for weeks and you wouldn’t even care, because you’re not hungry. You wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, because you couldn’t sleep at all last night. You wouldn’t want to talk about this with your friends, because they would pity you or worse, say, "I’ve felt that way before." The truth is most people haven’t. Most people haven’t felt this aching loneliness. Most people don’t know what it’s like to be so uninterested in everything that you can’t even smile at your favorite things. Most people don’t get that being lonely isn’t an emotion. But you can’t say that because it would cause too much trouble and honestly, you just want to sleep.

Loneliness is waking up tired, going to school tired, eating dinner tired, and going to bed tired, but not being able to sleep. It's having to go to work because you can’t call in saying I’m just lonely. Lonely is being not able to express yourself because the words aren’t there, and even if they were no one would understand. It's wanting to just give up and sit in a dark room for hours but not being able to. It’s being jealous of anyone who can freely smile and be happy. That’s all you want, to be happy, to not be whatever this is.

It's not just all those things either. What loneliness is, is not being able to sleep at night. It's being dead tired but tossing and turning all night. It's having to take sleeping pills after hours of restlessness. It's taking the highest dose they can give you without overdosing, but not before considering taking more than that. You just want to sleep but you can't, for whatever reason, you are unable to sleep. Whether it's you and you can’t get comfortable, or the fact that every time you try and relax you remember everything wrong with you. You are just so tired.

I could go on and on with what it feels like. I could write paragraph after paragraph of what it feels like to be lonely but it wouldn’t do me any good, because if you didn’t get it by now you probably won’t get it. What I’ve been describing to you isn’t loneliness. It’s what it’s like to be clinically depressed. I have major depressive disorder, a chemical imbalance in my head. It’s true that you feel lonely but that’s not all. All my life I’ve wanted someone else to understand these words, but no one has. I want people to understand what this is. Depression isn’t an emotion; it isn’t common. It's worse than anything I’ve seen. It chips away at you until there is nothing left.

That's what most people don't get. It's not common. Major depressive disorder affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older, in a given year. That seems like a lot but it's not really. For the number of people claiming it. Most people with this problem don't want people to know. We don't wear shirts that say, "Hey I have MDD look at me." We don't want to bother people with our problems because it's our fault, not theirs.

Depression is something that I wouldn't ever want to burden anyone with. It is something worse than anything I've seen. It's a war inside where there are no winners, just a broken shell. What I want however is nothing more than a far-off dream at this point. I want people to understand. I want people to stop comparing a sad moment to a lifetime of unhappiness and hopelessness. I want people to stop making jokes about this. I want people to stop making light of all mental illness, whether it's common or not. I want people to stop and for once consider what on the other side of that joke, or that cut, or that rope, or that bottle. I want this more than anything, but I know I won't ever get it. Even when I'm long dead and buried, people will still do all of that. They won't consider, they won't understand, because that what humans do. If it isn't them then it doesn't matter. And that's truly sad.