David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

loneliness

How can we be lonely while we’re surrounded by billions of people?

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Marleen Brooks found a note waiting for her when she got to her home in Park Hills, Mo., one evening last year. She had never heard of Wanda Mills, but her heart broke when she read the handwritten plea.

“Would you consider to become my friend,” said the note from Mills. “I’m 90 years old — live alone and all my friends have passed away. I am so lonesome and scared. Please — I pray for some one.”

Brooks is a 37-year-old property manager and she had no idea this woman even existed, but the address was for a house across the street from her and just a couple of doors down. She didn’t know anyone even lived there.

The next day, Brooks and a friend took cupcakes and went to visit Mills. (See the photo below.) The friends spent about an hour with the older woman. They found out Mills had lived in the house for 51 years. Her husband was dead. Most of her remaining family was either dead or lived far away.

Living in the middle of a busy neighborhood, Mills was invisible — and lonely.

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I fear nobody will come with me as I start down a difficult path

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One of the first lessons we learn in life is to follow the crowd.

Nobody has to tell us this. The cruelty of group dynamics — frequently not examined consciously — pull us and prod us to conform. And because we like the praise of the crowd and fear the crowd’s ridicule, we innocently become sheep — following the herd almost anywhere it goes.

The crowd isn’t very smart or deep. The crowd isn’t very reflective. The crowd follows whatever shiny new thing comes along. For many reasons, following the crowd takes us further and further away from becoming the individuals we were born to be. But because most people are so busy following the crowd — and pursuing the pleasure which the crowd glorifies — they almost never notice this.

I was never a complete crowd-follower. I was proud of being more independent than most. But I eventually realized I was suffocating without meaning. I had accepted too much of what the world — the crowd, really — had given me.

And now that I’ve slowly started asking more and more questions — and finding answers which might as well be unknown tongues to the crowd — I fear that I’m on a path on which nobody I care about will follow.

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Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart

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Lonely night walker

It starts out as a vague discomfort. Your brain knows something is wrong in your body and there’s an immediate running monologue in your head.

What’s wrong? I can’t tell what’s wrong.

Maybe your heart beats a little faster. There’s a gnawing in your chest. There’s discomfort in your gut. It’s almost as though there’s something inside you with an urgent voice of its own.

What’s going on? Someone tell me what’s going on.

But you have no answer for the voice. You’re confused. You don’t know what you need. You don’t know what’s wrong. You just feel a growing sense of dread and panic. The sensations in your body are growing more urgent.

What do I need? Am I hungry? I must be hungry. I need something. What do I need?

The feeling of missing someone can create incredibly intense physical sensations in your heart and in your gut. The discomfort usually starts in the gut, but sometimes it starts higher — in the chest around the heart. It all works together, but you’re not even sure what’s going on. You end up guessing.

This is about her, isn’t it? Why am I thinking about her? Was I thinking about her or something else?

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