“’I’m lonely, and I want to have
a family’, and there’s a kind of shame in that.”
“if I were to write the truth [to
a dating site] – that I’m lonely and worried I might not have a family – it
would be just the most off-putting thing.”
“The greatest suffering is being
lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one,” Mother Teresa wrote.
“They feel ashamed or
embarrassed, as though feeling lonely isn’t something serious.”
“I think it is very likely”, [the
psychologist Adam Phillips] says, “that people who are lonely as adults were
lonely as children.”
Looking back, James explains, he
reckons he had begun to distance himself from his parents and their bitterly
unhappy marriage when he was about six. By the time they divorced, when he was
nine, he was “completely separate” from them: “I was living in the same house
as my mother and sister, but I probably wouldn’t spend more than 15 minutes a day
in their company. I routinely had meals alone, then went back up to my room and
stayed there, alone.”
“Loneliness is worthlessness. You
feel you don’t fit in, that people don’t understand you. You feel terrible
about yourself, you feel rejected. Everyone goes to the pub, but they don’t
invite you. Why? Because there’s something wrong with you.”
“Like being surrounded by a dark
void that you have no way of crossing.”
“Mental-health problems and
depression are quite fashionable now, but loneliness is not fashionable.
There’s something shameful about it – ‘it’s my fault, there’s something wrong
with me, I’m a horrible person.’”
For 91-year-old Robbie, living in
Kent and a widower since 2012, “loneliness is not having somebody to do nothing
with.”
After three books by Kaiko, I’m
now reading The Sacred Willow by Mai Eliott. Yesterday, another book by
Tim O’brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, arrived and Tanizawa Eiichi’s
book on Kaiko should be on its way here.
