Why do we feel lonely in rooms full of people?
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” — May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude.
You are at a party, or a dinner, or a work event with colleagues you know reasonably well.
The room is loud and warm and full of conversation, and somewhere inside you, quiet and specific, is the feeling that none of this is actually reaching you. That you are present without being there.
The loneliness in a crowd is harder to admit than the loneliness of an empty room because it feels like an accusation.
If people surround you and you still feel cut off, the implication seems to be that the fault lies with you. That you are the missing ingredient in your own company.
I think what we call social loneliness is often the gap between the version of yourself you present and the version that actually exists.
Every social interaction requires a degree of presentation, a filtering of what you bring to the surface. Sometimes the gap between what you are presenting and what you actually feel is so wide that no amount of company can reach across it.
“The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.” - Norman Cousins
Being known is different from being seen.
You can be looked at, addressed, and laughed with for an entire evening and still leave feeling unseen because none of the exchanges landed on anything real. The conversation stayed at the surface, as most conversations do, and the surface is not where you live.
This is not something you can solve by talking more or going to more parties. The remedy, when there is one, is usually a single conversation that goes somewhere honest, and those are rarer than they should be.
You are not odd for feeling this, as it is one of the most common experiences in modern life and one of the least spoken about.
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