The Loneliness of Not Belonging

I have an incredibly vivid memory of sitting on a silver table in the senior quad during Year 12 and having lunch with a group of ‘friends’ (I’m using this term incredibly loosely). The girls at my table sat around talking to each other about our upcoming exams, what they’d done on the weekend, and just generally engaging in a bit of lighthearted gossip and banter. I was sat right in the middle of the table, which you’d think would be a prime location for being included in these conversations…but alas, the girls on either side of me had their bodies sharply angled away from me, and despite my longing stares, no one met my gaze.

It was at this moment I realised that, despite having people to sit with at school, I didn’t actually have any real friends. Everyone’s social lives functioned just as well without me, and my presence at any table we sat at really made no difference. I was simply an extra in their stories.

It’s a crushing feeling knowing that people wouldn’t notice if you weren’t there. On many occasions, I physically got up and left, and no one followed or seemed to notice that I was gone. From here, I began to sit with a new group of people, but was met with the same disheartening fate. At first, I thought I had cracked the code, because this new group of girls included me in their annual Secret Santa, but it turns out that it was all a joke, which unfortunately came at my expense. While I had gone out and purchased an incredibly thoughtful gift for my recipient, a book they said they were keen to read, I was given a fireman calendar filled with pictures of naked men by the one student who had unfortunately guessed that I was a closeted lesbian. As their laughs rang through my ears and I fought back tears, I vowed to stop trying to be friends with people and to just sit alone for the rest of my schooling (which I did). 

Being alone and being lonely are not necessarily the same experience. Often, when I was loneliest, I found myself utterly surrounded by people, usually hundreds of them in a playground at a 1000+ student school. I believe that the loneliest part of it all was that, despite there being an absolute plethora of options for connection, no one was particularly interested in knowing me. Being excluded, rejected or ignored has a way of making you feel as though you aren’t worthy of relationships, and it can be easy to start questioning what you’ve done wrong or what’s wrong with you. For me, I internalised this experience of loneliness and started to believe all of the horrible things that people would say about me - I must be a loser, I must be arrogant, I must be the lesbian perving on all of her friends, I must be a know-it-all, I must be a b*tch. 

It took me a long time to unpick all of these warped beliefs about myself from my real personality, and there are times where I regret that I ever allowed other people’s voices to cloud my judgment of the wonderful person that I am. But, with that being said, I did the best I could to cope at the time, and what happened to me was not my fault.

The last two years of high school felt unbearably lonely for me, but I certainly did as much as I could to placate that feeling. Here are a few things that helped me survive those years of not belonging, and things I wish I had have known at the time:

• Don’t treat other people’s rejection of you as proof that you aren’t enough

I fell down on this one because I didn’t know better at the time, but I’ve since learned that being excluded and isolated doesn’t necessarily count as ‘evidence’ that you suck. After talking to old classmates and attempting to make my peace with them, I’ve come to realise that there are a few types of people that contribute to loneliness. The first are those who just generally are really awful - they gain some kind of personal satisfaction from making others feel small, and that says more about them than it does about you. The second are the bystanders - the people who fear rejection just as much as you, but fear that if they stand up for you or be your friend, then they might be excluded too. 

None of these groups of people necessarily require your understanding or forgiveness if you’ve been treated badly, but it is good to know that often people’s motives for excluding you really have nothing to do with who you are. There are some people that you just don’t gel with, which is natural, and some who don’t have the emotional capacity or compassion to be what you need in that moment. It doesn’t mean that you are unlovable or that you aren’t worth much as a person, it just means that they have some work to do on themselves. 

• Find places where you do feel safe and take solace in the small morsels of connection you can find there

Of course, knowing that ‘it’s not you, it’s them’ doesn’t really make you feel much better when you’re eating lunch in the bathrooms by yourself. The thing that helped me the most was looking outside the world I was in and finding connection in other ways. Instead of forcing myself to sit through a lonely lunchtime outside watching all my peers have fun with each other, I would go to the library and study. Sure, it didn’t feel great to be sitting there working alone, but the librarians knew me by name and something about that felt nice. They even let me eat inside, which I greatly appreciated. I also used my lunchtimes to look for jobs, and I started essay marking for a tutoring company in a city I one day hoped to live in. By looking to the future instead of marinating in the pain of the present, I met people who praised my intelligence rather than decimating me for it. I saw that there were people out there who saw value in who I was and what I had to offer, and it gave me hope that maybe not everyone in this world was horrible and would hate me. 

Finally, and probably most crucially for me, I took solace in online LGBTQIA+ communities. As a gay kid who was outed at school, I could not have felt more different, and that is a lonely thing. So, in the morning before heading off to school, a.k.a my least favourite place in the entire universe, I would watch videos of queer couples talking about their relationships on Youtube, or I would watch a few episodes of a webseries about lesbian vampires. If I was having a hard day, I’d go to the bathrooms and watch a bit more, or I’d whip out my phone and listen to them talking in my free periods. I didn’t know these people, but in those tough times, they were my friends. I knew everything about them, I laughed at their jokes, and they let me know that it was okay to be goofy and nerdy and gay. 

Did watching people online fill the hole of not having any real life friends? Not completely. Was it a bit lame and sad? Probably, but I have no shame about it and do credit it with saving my life in a lot of ways. If I didn’t have those Youtubers, I wouldn’t have made it through the days at school where my Mum refused to come pick me up. Without them, I wouldn’t have had a distraction from my painful feelings, and I probably wouldn’t have attended enough school to get through my HSC, let alone do well in it. Most importantly, without these online connections, I wouldn’t have known that it was okay to be myself and that there were other people out there who were just like me. 

The Loneliness of New Beginnings

Some years later, after high school was in the rearview mirror, I moved away from my small country town to a big city that was brand new to me. I was lucky that my parents moved with me, because aside from my family, I didn’t know a soul in this new place I was supposed to call home. I started uni, and I felt SO uneasy about being there on my own. Those same fears that haunted me in high school reemerged - who would I sit with at lunch? What if no one liked me? What if I ended up alone again? 

I am not the most social person. As a self-proclaimed introvert, I’m not particularly good at small talk and I have absolutely no idea what to say to someone when I first meet them. I can be incredibly shy and I fill the awkward silences with really unusual conversation starters (e.g. I once asked one of my sister’s friends whether he would rather drown or be burned alive as a way of getting to know him…not my smoothest opener). Despite all of my fears, my Mum assured me that this time would be different, and that if I had the courage to put myself out there, I would make friends. 

In my first few weeks at uni, I met two lovely girls who would be in all of my classes, and I tried my very best to strike up conversations with them. I felt anxious and nervous and completely out of my depth the entire time, but I did it anyway because I decided that being rejected was better than not trying at all, right? We seemed to hit things off, but when it came time to go away on our first-year weekend camp, the pressure got to me. These two girls seemed to have more in common with each other than they did with me, and I didn’t feel like I could compete with that. I let myself slide away from them, and again I faded into the background. They never said anything that led me to believe that they didn’t like me, but I found their ease in social situations and their comfort with each other intimidating, because I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere.

When I got home from camp, I cried to my parents for hours, and I felt the familiar pangs of loneliness rising up again.

Why did this keep happening? Why did people prefer everyone else but me?

As it turns out, I was letting my anxiety get the better of me this time. Elise and Louise, the two girls I’d met, actually really did like me, and asked me to hang out with them in classes and at lunch. I’d jumped the gun significantly based on my past experiences, and I’d assumed the worst of them before I’d even got to know them properly. Sure, they liked each other’s company, and had some inside jokes that I didn’t know, but they liked me too. Their fondness for each other didn’t mean that they didn’t want to be my friend as well.

Fresh starts can be intimidating. It can be really tough and lonely walking into a room where you don’t know a single person, but I’m glad that I persevered and pushed myself out of my comfort zone in order to give friendship another try. 7 years on, Elise and Louise are still some of my dearest friends, and we still catch up for drinks and dinners and birthdays despite the fact that our lives have converged in very different paths. 

My friendship with them, and my time as an outsider at uni, has taught me a lot of things:

• Be generous with your assumptions of people

Just because someone doesn’t reach out to you constantly or seems to have other, much closer friends doesn’t mean that they don’t have space for you in their lives too. Even though it can be hard if you’ve been rejected before, try not to assume that a delayed reply or one declined dinner invitation means that someone has zero interest in hanging out with you. People get busy and conversations and friendships sometimes fall through the cracks, but the right people come back to you when they are ready. In new friendships, remember that the other person likely feels just as nervous as you do, and probably doesn’t want to overdo it or seem needy either. Other people have worries and anxieties about making friends too, because it’s not the easiest thing to do. Assume the best of the people you meet and want to make friends with, because they probably aren’t judging you as harshly as you’re judging yourself.

• Put yourself out there - always

Looking back on my move to the big city, I’m often baffled by the courage I had in putting myself out there. If a new work colleague asked me if I wanted to grab dinner, I would say yes. If a group of people I barely knew invited me to a party, I would get all dolled up and turn up alone. If plans with friends fell through, I would text acquaintances and see if they wanted to meet up for a drink instead of spending my Friday nights at home watching Better Homes & Gardens with my parents. I was the ultimate ‘yes man’, and it paid off. I’ve met loads of people in my time here - some fabulous, some who weren’t right for me - but it was only because I let myself be vulnerable and made it clear that I was looking to meet people. Don’t get me wrong, I felt WILDLY uncomfortable a lot of the time, but trust and comfort comes with time and you can’t build that with someone if you don’t get to know them first. 

The Loneliness of Distance

A brand new type of loneliness reared its ugly head when my parents informed me that they would be moving back home and that I would be living in the city without them a few years back. I still had friends and my sister down here, but something about not being able to see them every day felt remarkably lonely. Even though I could pick up the phone and Facetime them whenever I wanted, it didn’t quite feel the same as being able to give them a hug or just knowing that they were loitering around somewhere in the house. 

They say that home is where the heart is, and my heart will always lie with my family. I still miss them uncontrollably some days, and certainly have moments where my longing to be near them feels painful. This sense of loneliness has become even more stark since I moved out of my sister’s place and started living alone. While the independence of having my own home is amazing, there’s something about being alone that sometimes feels…lonely. Who knew? My best friend recently moved states as well, so it can be hard not to feel as though the supports and connections in my life are drifting further and further away. 

For me, there’s a big difference between being lonely and being scared of being alone. The desire to be around certain people is not the same thing as fearing what will happen if they aren’t there and you have to face yourself. I know that if I’m afraid to be alone with my thoughts that it’s time to get some extra help, because it usually means that my OCD or depression are lurking in the background. When I’m lonely, I allow myself to feel that way - to cry, to miss the people I love, to want to be near them. When my sister and I went our separate ways, she repeated a quote to me from A.A. Milne - “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard”. I think about this often, because my loneliness can sometimes be a poignant reminder of the wonderful people I have in my life and love so dearly.

With that being said, missing people and being physically isolated from them still isn’t pleasant, no matter how grateful you are to have them. I haven’t mastered this side of loneliness yet by any means, but here are a couple of things that get me through when my loved ones feel so damn far:

• Plan dates with yourself

Often, I find myself ruminating and missing my loved ones when I haven’t planned anything nice for myself for a while. The thing that I miss about my family is the shared sense of joy that comes with the activities we do together - cooking dinner, watching movies, singing along to our favourite songs. Just because I can’t always share those experiences with others doesn’t mean that I have to go without, so I usually try and take myself out alone when I can. Occasionally, I’ll take a book or a good podcast to my local pub and have a solo schnitty, while other times I might go to the movies or the beach by myself. I think a key part of these dates-for-one is that they actually do involve getting out and being around people. Even if I don’t know them, it can be comforting to eat a meal or watch a movie with other people around who are laughing and enjoying themselves as well. 

• Use technology to your advantage

While a phone call might not feel the same as being with someone, there are some added extras that can make it feel a little closer to the real deal. My Mum and I call each other on our lunch breaks, and we will often tell each other what we are eating, or we’ll both make a cup of tea to have at the same time. Nothing makes me feel close to Mum like hearing her chomp down a salad in my ear.

When my family are doing fun things without me, I do often wish I was there, but I try to include myself in the fun as much as possible. We’ve set up a family WhatsApp group where we send photos of what we are doing, and this really helps me get a sense of what being with my family would be like if I was there. My family is a big fan of Triple J’s Hottest 100, but this year, we weren’t together to listen to the countdown as my parents were at home and my sister was away on holidays. Nonetheless, we all talked about the countdown in our chat, and sent photos of what we were doing to celebrate the day. My sister was at the beach with her partner, so I high-tailed it down to the nearest outdoor pool and took some happy snaps on the sand while listening to the music.  Likewise, when my sister goes home to visit my family without me, she always Facetimes me so that my grandparents and aunts and uncles can say hello at family dinner. My Nan always cooks up a wicked roast for these occasions, so if I know I can’t be there, I cook one up for myself and sit down to dinner at the same time as them. Sometimes, it makes me sad, but most of the time, it makes me smile to know that we are eating the same thing and thinking about the very same people that we love.