I wandered lonely as a cloud

Loneliness is something everyone of us has experienced. For some, it was a fleeting moment, for others it feels alienating and all-consuming. Regardless of your journey and relationship to loneliness, the feelings and emotions associated with it, will find a way into your life, at some point. It’s part of our humanness. 

Dr Vivek Murthy describes loneliness as a subjective feeling that we don’t have enough social connection in our life. This is different from isolation, which is an objective term focused on how many people you have around you. What matters is what you feel. Just because you are in a room full of people, doesn’t mean that you feel connected to them. You could feel lonely in that setting. By contrast, just because you don’t have many people around you doesn’t mean that you are lonely.

What matters is the quality and strength of our connections in determining whether or not we feel lonely.

To move beyond loneliness, we must seek out its root cause. We must look it in the eye and start unpacking it, layer by layer. 

I have had many difficult conversations with loneliness over the course of my life. The loneliest I have ever felt was when I was married. I thought that being married would exclude me from feeling lonely; turns out it doesn’t. My sense of loneliness framed every day and triggered a tsunami of negative emotions: feelings of judgement, deep shame and embarrassment. How could I be sharing my life with someone, yet feel so disconnected and alone? I felt unseen, unheard and none of my needs were being met, but I didn’t connect the dots at the time; I didn’t realise that it was my relationship that was making me feel lonely, I thought it was because I was living abroad, physically isolated from my friends and family.

The shame I carried, stopped me from sharing what was really going on behind the facade of “happily ever after.” My sense of failing and loneliness grew which over time, eroded my confidence, self-worth and my health.

I emerged from this sea of loneliness by taking hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible steps.

I knew that I couldn’t run from loneliness - not in the long term - because my health was suffering. So, one big thing I did was hire a coach who helped me process and let go of the shame and judgement, so I could free up space to move forward. I focused on building my self-worth; and as the love for myself grew, so did my confidence in admitting that I was actually in an abusive marriage. Here’s the irony, when I left my ex-husband, I was living in Toronto by myself, totally isolated from my friends and family due to COVID. And yet I didn’t feel lonely; my connection to myself was enough. 

I know that coaching is often misunderstood and financially prohibitive for a lot of people. What I have shared is the reason why I feel so passionate about making coaching available to everyone; it saved me from drowning in my loneliness, and it gave me the strength to leave an abusive marriage. 

At the end of the day, strong relationships are the antibody to loneliness: strong relationships with yourself and with others. One of the hallmarks of strong relationships is feeling that we can show up as ourselves, and be accepted and loved unconditionally in return. 

If you feel lonely, please identify a person in your life who is loving, who holds space for you and whom you feel comfortable being with. Find one small thing you can do in the next 24 hours to spend time with them (you don't have to tell them you feel lonely, just be with them in any way you can). If you don’t have a person in your life who you feel you can do this with, please book a free session with me. You are not alone. 

We hope that through our community, more people feel the warmth and love that comes from having a deep connection with yourself and with others.  

Note: “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are the words of poet William Wordsworth.