The Kind of Lonely Nobody Sees

I don't really remember when I first started feeling lonely.

If someone asked me when it began, I wouldn't be able to give them a particular day or even a particular year. I think it happened slowly, without me really noticing. There wasn't one moment where everything changed. I just gradually became someone who was very good at being by herself.

I had friends. That's the part that always made it difficult to explain.

At school, I could sit with people at lunch and have conversations and laugh at things that weren't even that funny. I had people I could message, people whose birthdays I remembered and who remembered mine. If someone looked at my life from the outside, I don't think they would have thought I was lonely at all.

But I was.

I would come home after spending the entire day around other people and feel this strange emptiness as soon as I closed my bedroom door. Sometimes I'd lie on my bed and scroll through my phone, watching everyone else making plans, going places and doing things together. I'd see photos from nights I hadn't been invited to, or conversations I wasn't part of, and I'd tell myself that it didn't matter. Of course it mattered. I'd just become very good at pretending it didn't.

I think one of the hardest things about loneliness is that you can start making excuses for everyone else. I'd tell myself that people were busy, that they probably didn't realise I wanted to be included, that maybe I hadn't reached out enough. Sometimes I'd even convince myself that I preferred being alone. There was some truth in that. Being alone was easier than feeling unwanted. At least when I was by myself, I didn't have to wonder whether someone was choosing not to talk to me.

I became quieter over time. If someone asked me how I was, I'd smile and say I was fine. If I was having a difficult day, I'd usually keep it to myself because I didn't want to be the person who always had something going on. I worried that if I needed people too much, eventually they'd get tired of me.

So I stopped asking. I stopped sending the first message. I stopped saying, "Do you want to catch up?" I started waiting to see if anyone would come looking for me. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn't. Every time they didn't, it seemed to confirm everything I'd already been telling myself.

There were nights when I would sit in my room with the television playing in the background just so the house didn't feel so quiet. I wasn't really watching anything. I just liked having another voice in the room.

One night, I remember sitting there scrolling through my phone and realising that I hadn't had a proper conversation with anyone all day. I had spoken to people. I'd answered questions, smiled at people, made small talk. But nobody had actually asked me how I was doing. I put my phone down and just sat there for a while and for some reason, that night I finally admitted something to myself that I hadn't wanted to admit before.

I was lonely. Not because nobody cared about me, not because I had nobody. I was lonely because I hadn't let anyone know that I needed them. The next morning, I almost forgot about it.

Then a friend messaged me asking if I wanted to get coffee.

It was such a small thing. Nothing dramatic happened. There wasn't some huge conversation where I finally told them everything I'd been keeping inside. We just sat in a café and talked about ordinary things. Eventually, though, they asked me how I'd really been doing and I nearly gave them the usual answer -"I'm fine." I'd said it so many times that it almost came automatically, but this time I stopped. I looked down at my coffee and said, "Actually, I've been feeling pretty lonely lately."

I felt embarrassed the second the words came out. I expected them to tell me I wasn't alone, or to give me some advice, or maybe even to make me feel like I was making a bigger deal out of things than I needed to. Instead, they just said, "I didn't know." and then, after a moment, they said, "I'm glad you told me."

That conversation didn't magically make everything better. I still have lonely days. I still sometimes find myself sitting in a room full of people and feeling like I'm somewhere completely different. I still have moments where I wonder whether I'm bothering people when I reach out. But I'm learning not to let those thoughts make all of my decisions for me. I'm learning that sometimes people don't know we need them until we tell them. And I'm learning that being lonely doesn't necessarily mean there is nobody there.

Sometimes it means we've become so afraid of being rejected, forgotten or being "too much" that we've slowly built the walls ourselves.

I'm still learning how to knock those walls down. Sometimes it starts with something as simple as sending a message instead of waiting for someone else to do it. Some days it means saying, "Do you want to come over?" even when I'm worried they'll say no.

And it also means being honest when someone asks how I'm doing because I've realised that I don't actually need to have the perfect words. I can just say, "I've been feeling a little lonely lately." and maybe that's enough of an invitation for someone to sit beside me.