The Loneliness Lie: What if You're Not As Lonely As You Think You Are

Loneliness

The word lonely is a big one for me. 

Anxious, sad, hopeless….I’ve felt them all at my lowest. But all these years later, after so much growth and healing, it’s the word lonely that can take me back down the quickest. 

I think the feeling of being alone even when I had people around me came from believing no-one could possibly understand what I was going through. 

I know that’s not true now, because human emotions are universally felt and understood. But it felt true. And sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly down, I will dip back into this old belief that no one in the world could ever understand what I’m going through, and I have to give my head a wobble. 

I was 5-years old when I was told there was something wrong with me. That my spine was twisting as I grew, and that I may need to have an operation when I was older which, if it went wrong, would mean I might never walk again.

We didn’t talk about it. It was just always there, hanging over me like a dark cloud. And now that I’m older, and I’ve finally got a handle on my thoughts and generalised worry, I can see that I lived in a state of acute anxiety throughout most of my childhood. 

We tend to think that kids of a certain age can’t understand much of what is going on around them. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

I didn’t realise kids could absorb so much of the energy around them and intuit so much until I became an RTT therapist. The training opened my eyes massively to how the mind works, but working with my own clients and seeing it first hand has been mind-blowing.

I learned that babies feel and interpret everything that goes on around them. I learned that children take every negative situation and blame themselves for them. I learned that the subconscious mind stores clear memories from as far back as the womb. 

So it doesn’t surprise me that I internalised not only my own fear, but the fear from my parents, about what was going to happen to me. 

We went to Disneyland Paris before I had the operation when I was 12. Again, no-one talked about it, but I knew we went because they were scared of what might happen to me. It was a wonderful trip, but the dark cloud loomed thicker than ever. 

I would feel brief moments of happiness linked to excitement, like a rush of adrenaline. But the opposite of anxiety isn’t happiness, it’s peace. 

And I’d never once felt a moment of peace. My mind wouldn’t allow it. Too busy circling round and round, scared to ask the questions it wanted to ask, to settle even for a moment in case the fear crept in. 

Me and the bath became best friends. I would hide in there for hours and cry. I’d come out and tell my sister my hayfever had been playing up if she asked. I didn’t want anyone to worry about me. I didn’t know what I was feeling, and I couldn’t remember ever feeling any other way. So I didn’t know things could be better. I didn’t know anything really, I was only 11 years old. 

I only knew one other person with Scoliosis as severe as mine, and that was my auntie. She lived almost two hours away. I wouldn’t have told her I was scared if she’d asked me.

My fear of loneliness, of being disconnected in a situation ‘no-one can relate to’ had chased me through my life. 

I started over and became a single mum when my baby was 9 months old, and there it was again. I would sit on a beanbag feeding her in the middle of the night when there wasn’t a single sound from the road outside my window. 

I've never felt more alone. But I wasn’t alone, far from it. I had so many friends and family around me, I was just stuck in a mental rut and couldn’t see it any other way.

I had a story. A story my mind created when I was 5. ‘There is something wrong with me, no one understands and I have to pretend to be okay.’  

Plug that in and play it on repeat for decades and feeling isolated is inevitable. 

I understand why my 5-year old brain created the story. I wanted my family to love me, and they always loved it when I was happy, so I pretended I was okay when I wasn’t. 

But I’ll never be 5 again. I know better than to hide my feelings and my sadness from the people that I love. And I’ve learned that being vulnerable and expressing how I really feel no matter how raw and painful it is has given me the kind of deep connections I’ve always wanted.

Loneliness is a state of mind. It comes from feeling disconnected, different, unrelatable to the world and people around you. It’s a story, and if it’s your story it will keep playing until you politely decline to listen to it anymore. 

If you feel a pang in your heart when you hear the word ‘lonely’, it’s worth thinking back to find where it came from. Once you connect to the younger version of you who felt disconnected and alone, give them a hug, tell them it’s okay, and remind them (and yourself) that you get to change your story. 

To work with Nikki and start your journey of transformation, click here.