The other side of loneliness

A wooden chair beside a wooden desk with a plant and some books.

Hello Sweet One,

This feels like an especially important moment to me, because writing workshops are where I’ve found gaps in the sticky film of loneliness that seems to cover everything in 2020.

Human connection has drastically changed shape this year. We’re all looking around this new planet, getting to know what it does to our bodies, to our hearts.

Here’s one example — the New York Times published graphs of social media use from January through April, and the Facebook one especially is the spike of all spikes — it looks like a soft, pillowy valley rising into a sheer mountain cliff. That is a mountain of performative photos and edited smiles. It’s a mountain of late night scrolling in a bluey glow. A mountain of lonely.

And the impact of that loneliness, God, it’s everywhere. Loneliness makes us frantic, sad, tired, irritable, demanding of ourselves and others. Loneliness makes us stop taking care of ourselves. It thins out our connection to insight and compassion.

I believe that connection — the authentic, messy, human connection that has room for grumpy days and fear and big questions — is the opposite of that. It’s the valley at the bottom of the mountain, the shared space of humanness where we can see one another past our Zoom rectangles and know we’re not alone.

I love that kind of connection. I thrive on it. I wish it for us all.

Connection fairly happened naturally when we were circling in and out of the lives of strangers and friends, face to face, no fear, no protection. Now we have to build it in, to insist on it, to lean past the limits of our confines in order to find each other.

Of course, there are many ways to do that. I wouldn’t ever tell you that writing community is all you need. It’s no panacea. But it’s where I go, and it’s what I’ve held onto this spring and summer, and it has really helped.

I like to think that these are ways we can shimmy down off that mountain of lonely and into a better place.

Thanks for reading along.

It’s 2020. We’re lonely. We’re weird. We’re just getting to know this new place. That’s okay.

There is hope here. There are ways to help each other. There are flags to raise on this new land and new conversations to be had that weren’t possible before. We can build something good. I’m sure of it.

In it with you,