When I think about how my loneliness started, my mind immediately goes back to the high school days; an endless succession of afternoons and evenings spent alone in my room, after mornings spent alone in a classroom full of people.
Nobody was actively going out of their way to make sure I stayed alone. Nobody bullied me into isolation – there was some bullying, but nothing that couldn’t be handled by keeping a person at a distance.
I wasn’t excluded. I was just… not included. There’s a difference, and it matters.
The loneliness I’m talking about doesn’t look like the movies. I was rarely physically alone, my days were rarely silent. I didn’t lack company in my life.
I would go to school, laugh at someone’s joke, have a perfectly fine conversation — but I wasn’t in anyone’s plans for the weekend. Again, nobody decided to exclude me. It’s just that nobody thought of me when they were thinking “Who would I like to spend my evening with?”
The thing is, I wasn’t even necessarily sad about it. I didn’t know I was supposed to be hanging out with somebody, why would I be sad? It didn’t feel like a problem, although it became increasingly clear that it was a big one.
Now I knew I had a problem I didn’t know how to solve, and what does a dumb teenager with zero motivation do when he has a problem? That’s right, he hides it.
It came really easy; nobody noticed I had something different. I could hold a conversation, I could be pleasant, I could make people laugh. Surely a person with basic – some might say better than average – social skills has real friends, right?
That was the point. If showing weakness is an invitation for bullying, then there is no weakness.
When I turned eighteen, I didn’t want a party. Not because I didn’t want to celebrate — because I didn’t want my classmates to realize I had no one else to invite. That’s the calculation you make when you’ve been invisible long enough: you start architecting your life around the concealment of your own loneliness.
It’s hard to describe a typical day in my most solitary years, because it was so empty that there is nothing to describe.
School. Home. Homework. PlayStation. Food. Sleep. Repeat.
Today it’s extremely easy for me to spot the unhealthy pattern in this. After years of therapy, it became trivial. There is one problem, though: I didn’t suffer through those days, I felt perfectly fine. I was never pushed out of my comfort zone; I was never challenged. That was the place for my mind to rest after a hard day at school pretending to be something I wasn’t in order to not show that I was lonely.
I didn’t hate the solitude itself, I actually kind of enjoyed it. To this day I live on my own, I have no roommates or pets, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. What I’ve come to hate was the waste —those hours, days, years that passed through me without leaving anything behind. That has nothing to do with the absence of other people in my life; it’s all about the absence of myself in my own life.
Things didn’t stay that way forever. At university I formed some real friendships — people I genuinely enjoyed, people I still talk to today. The distance and the lack of a car kept us from seeing each other as much as I would have liked, but those connections never fully disappeared. I was actually the best man at one of these people’s wedding.
By absolute chance, I also reconnected with some high school classmates. One birthday invitation triggered something: suddenly there were Saturday nights, different groups, new people. From 2012 to 2015 I lived what I can only describe as a functional social life — not deep, not perfect, but real enough. Some of those groups I remember fondly. Others less so. Eventually, circumstances dismantled most of it.
What remained was the skill. I had learned, slowly and badly, how to move in the world with other people in it. That turned out to be worth more than any specific friendship.
If you’re sixteen and you recognize yourself in any of this, I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me.
Not having friends doesn’t make you worth less. It makes you someone who hasn’t found the right conditions yet — and conditions change.
Don’t wait for social life to arrive before you start living. Find the thing that pulls you forward — chess, archery, martial arts, whatever it is — and go deep into it. Not to meet people, to meet yourself. Because a person with real interests is already someone, and someone is a much better starting point than no one. The loneliness might stay for a while. It did for me. But you don’t have to hand it all your life.