Whatever you're
going through,
someone has
felt it too.

I was made redundant four months ago and I have not told anyone outside my immediate family. Not my friends, not the people I went to school with, not the colleagues at my old job who I still sometimes see for drinks. I have told an elaborate and ongoing lie about a new project I am working on, and the maintenance of this lie takes up a significant amount of my mental energy. I know this is not rational. I know that redundancy is not a moral failing and that half the people I am lying to have probably experienced it themselves. I know that the shame I feel is a product of things I was taught rather than things that are true. I know all of this and I am still lying. The job was my identity in a way I did not fully understand until it was gone. I introduced myself by what I did. When someone asked at a party who I was, I told them what I did. Now the question fills me with a low panic and I answer it with the lie and then spend the rest of the conversation managing the threads of the fiction. I have had interviews. Some have gone well enough. Nothing has come through yet. Every morning I get up at the time I used to get up for work and I sit at my desk and I apply for things and I try to believe that this period has an end. Most days I manage it. Some days I look at the screen and feel something very close to despair and I close the laptop and go for a walk and then come back and try again. That is all you can do. Try again. That is all any of us can do.

I am sixty-seven years old and I live alone and I want to tell younger people something that nobody tells you when you are young, which is that loneliness does not get easier with practice. You do not build up a tolerance to it. Every day you spend alone is its own thing, with its own weight. My wife died six years ago. We were married for thirty-nine years. I know that people say you get used to it, and in some mechanical sense that is true — I have learned to cook for one, to buy the small loaves, to stop reaching for her in the night. But getting used to something is not the same as it being all right. My children call regularly. They are good children. They visit when they can and I can see the relief on their faces when they leave, not because they are glad to go but because they are glad I am managing, and managing is all any of us want from each other at this point. Nobody wants to need too much. Nobody wants to be a burden. So we all perform our fine-ness at each other and go home. I joined a walking group in January. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I walk with twelve strangers through the same parks and we talk about the weather and occasionally something more, and I am grateful for it in a way I would not have believed possible ten years ago. Grateful for Tuesday. Grateful for Thursday. Grateful for the woman who always brings the thermos of tea and never remembers I take mine without sugar. These small things. These small things are everything now.

I failed my A levels. Not by a little. By a lot. And I know in the grand scheme of things it is a small thing and I know life is long and there are other paths and I have heard all of it, but I am eighteen and it does not feel small and I am allowed to say that even if it is not the right perspective. I worked hard. That is what I cannot get past. I genuinely worked hard. I did the revision, I made the plans, I got up early and I stayed up late and I tried and it was not enough. There is a particular humiliation in visible effort that leads to failure. If I had not tried, at least I could have said I had not tried. My friends are all going to university in September. I have watched them post their results and their celebrations and I have liked the photos and said congratulations and I mean it, I genuinely mean it, but there is a grief underneath the congratulations that I cannot say out loud because it would make me the person who could not be happy for other people, and I refuse to be that person. I am resitting. Or I am trying to work out how to resit. The system is not designed for people who need a second try, which is strange because surely almost everything worth doing requires more than one attempt. I am frightened and embarrassed and trying not to let either of those things win. I wrote this because I needed to say somewhere that I am not okay right now, and that is all right, and I will be.

I am a single dad and I have been since my daughter was eighteen months old. She is seven now. I want to tell you that it is fine, that we are fine, because in most of the ways that matter we genuinely are. She is happy. She is funny and kind and obsessed with frogs and she goes to school and has friends and says I love you before bed every night without being prompted. But there is a tiredness that I carry that I cannot explain to anyone who has not done this. Not physical tiredness, though there is that too. A deeper tiredness. The tiredness of being the only one. Every decision, every fear, every middle-of-the-night worry about whether she is developing properly, whether I am doing enough, whether the thing she said on Tuesday means something or nothing — all of it lands on me and only me and there is no one to turn to in the dark and say: am I getting this right? I had a relationship for eight months last year. It ended because she found the weight of it difficult, the ready-made family, the way my daughter always comes first. I understood. I do not blame her. But I have not tried again since because the thought of opening that up and having it close again is more exhausting than I can face right now. My daughter asked me last week if I was lonely. She is seven and she asked me that with her big serious eyes and I said no, of course not, I have you. She said good, then went back to drawing a frog. I think she knew I was lying. Children always know.

I am a nurse and I have been for twelve years and I want to say something that I could not say to anyone I work with because we are all supposed to be fine, all supposed to be coping, all supposed to have put the armour on so thick that nothing gets through. It gets through. All of it gets through. I held the hand of a man who died alone because his family could not get there in time, and I talked to him, I kept talking even after he stopped responding because it seemed important that he should not go in silence, and then I went and washed my hands and went back onto the ward and took four more observations and I did not cry until I was in my car in the car park at eleven at night and then I cried for twenty minutes and drove home. This is Tuesday. This is a fairly ordinary Tuesday. The pandemic made it worse but the pandemic did not create it. It was there before. The structural loneliness of caring for people in a system that does not have the resources to care for the people who care. We talk about burnout like it is an individual failing, like the nurses who leave are the ones who were not strong enough. It is not that. It is that the strongest people I know are walking around with wounds that nobody is treating, and we are all just quietly bleeding and going back onto the ward. I love this job. I want to make that clear. I would not know how to be anything else. I just needed somewhere to put this.

I came out to my parents at Christmas. I had rehearsed it for months. I had a whole speech prepared. In the end it came out nothing like the speech. It came out as me crying at the kitchen table at eleven at night while the leftover turkey sat in the fridge and my mum stared at the tablecloth. My dad left the room. Not dramatically. He just said he needed some air and got up and went outside and stood in the garden in the cold for about twenty minutes. When he came back in he did not say anything about what I had told him. He asked if I wanted a cup of tea. I said yes. We drank tea and watched television and went to bed. That was four months ago. It has not been mentioned since. Not once. My mum asked me a few weeks later how I was doing, and when I tried to bring it up she changed the subject so quickly and so smoothly that for a moment I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing. I have not been home since. I know that some people have much worse coming out stories. I know that some people get thrown out, or screamed at, or worse. I am not trying to claim the biggest wound. But there is something particular about being loved conditionally, about your parents deciding that the easiest thing to do with an inconvenient truth is to simply not look at it. I am twenty-three years old and I do not know if my parents actually know me. I am not sure they want to.

My best friend stopped talking to me a year ago and I still do not know why. One month we were fine, or I thought we were fine, and the next month the messages stopped coming back. I tried for about three months. I sent messages I am not proud of in their desperation. Eventually I stopped because the silence had become its own answer even if it was not a clear one. We had been friends for eleven years. I was at her wedding. She was in the room when I got the phone call about my dad. We had the kind of friendship where you do not have to perform, where you can sit in comfortable silence, where you can say the real things. Or I thought we did. Now I wonder if I was wrong about all of it. That is the particular cruelty of this kind of ending — it does not just take the future, it retroactively destabilises the past. I have thought about what I might have done. I have run through years of conversations, searched for the thing I missed. I may have found it, or I may have invented something that fits the shape of the gap. I will probably never know. People say that friendships end and that is natural and I believe them intellectually. But this friendship was a load-bearing wall in my life and removing it without warning has left things structurally unsound in ways I am still discovering. I am rebuilding. I have people around me. But there is a specific shape of loss that only she could have filled and it sits there in the architecture of my days, an absence in the exact outline of someone I loved.

I have been sober for three years and four months and I still do not know who I am without alcohol. People at the meetings talk about finding themselves, about rediscovering joy, about becoming the person they were always meant to be. I smile and I nod and I collect my chips. Inside I feel like an empty building that someone forgot to furnish. I drank for fifteen years. That is not a typo. I started at nineteen because everyone did and I stopped at thirty-four because I was going to die if I did not. The drinking gave me a personality, or at least what felt like one. I was funny when I drank. I was brave. I could talk to strangers, I could dance, I could sit in a pub for six hours and feel like I belonged somewhere. Sober me is quiet and careful and a bit dull, and I am grieving him, the drunk version, even though he nearly killed me. My sponsor tells me to be patient. My therapist tells me identity formation takes time. My friends from the meetings tell me it gets easier. They are probably all right. I believe them on the good days. On the bad days I sit in my flat and watch television and think about the version of myself that existed before I understood what I was doing, when drinking was just something fun that people did, and I miss him with an ache that I cannot put a name to. Three years and four months. I am still here. That has to count for something.

I have been married for nineteen years and I think I stopped loving my husband somewhere around year eleven. I cannot tell you the exact moment it happened. There was no fight, no betrayal, no dramatic ending. Just a slow and quiet withdrawal, like a tide going out so gradually you only notice when the sand is completely bare. We still sleep in the same bed. We still go on holiday every summer. We still laugh at the same programmes on television. From the outside we look like a success story. Friends tell us we are couple goals. I smile when they say it and I feel like the worst kind of fraud. The hardest part is that he is a good man. A genuinely good man. He has never been cruel. He works hard, he is kind to my mother, he remembers the things I tell him. I have no righteous reason to leave. I just feel nothing where I used to feel something, and I have spent eight years now trying to decide whether that matters. I read an article once that said marriages change form over time and that comfortable companionship is a valid and beautiful thing. I held onto that for years. Some days I still believe it. Other days I lie awake while he sleeps and I think: is this it? Is this what the rest of my life looks like? And the question does not feel peaceful. It feels like a door slowly closing on a room I never quite got to explore.

My father died in October and everyone keeps telling me I am handling it so well. I want to scream every time someone says it. I am not handling it well. I am handling it in the only way I know how, which is to not handle it at all and to keep moving so fast that it cannot catch me. I arranged the funeral. I called the relatives. I wrote the eulogy and I stood up and I delivered it clearly and I only paused once, for about three seconds, and apparently that impressed everyone enormously. Afterwards my aunt said she did not know where I got my strength from. I wanted to say: I do not have strength. I have terror. I have never been more frightened in my life and the only thing that is keeping me upright is the fear of what happens if I stop. He was not a perfect father. I need to say that somewhere, even if only here. He was difficult and stubborn and he had a way of making you feel that your achievements were just slightly less than what he had hoped for. I spent thirty-four years trying to impress him. And now there is no one left to impress and I do not know what to do with all the effort I had saved up. I cried once, properly, in the car park of the crematorium after everyone had left. I sat in my car for forty minutes and I let it happen and then I wiped my face and drove home and made tea. I have not cried since. I am not sure I know how anymore.

I used to be someone who found it easy to ask for help. I do not know when that changed. Somewhere in my thirties I developed this idea that needing things from other people was a kind of imposition, and I carried that idea so carefully for so long that it became a wall, and now I am forty and I am very capable and very independent and very lonely in a way that I built myself, brick by brick, and I am not entirely sure how to take it apart. My friends love me. I know they do. They would help me if I asked. I cannot ask. Not because they would refuse but because the asking itself feels impossible, like a language I once spoke fluently and have now largely forgotten. I can help. I am excellent at helping. I remember birthdays, I show up in crises, I am the one people call. Being called feels manageable. Calling feels like admitting something I have decided not to admit. I started therapy six months ago. My therapist asked me in our third session when I learned that my needs were inconvenient. I sat with that question for about two weeks and then I cried about it in a Tesco car park on a Saturday afternoon, which was unexpected and also probably necessary. I am learning. Slowly. Last month I asked a friend if she could come with me to a hospital appointment because I did not want to go alone. She came immediately. She did not make it strange. She brought a coffee and she sat in the waiting room and we talked about television and it was fine. It was just fine. All that weight I had been carrying about the asking, and it was just fine. I am trying to remember that.

I immigrated here eight years ago and I want to talk about the particular loneliness of that, the kind that does not come from having no one around but from being surrounded by people who do not quite understand the shape of where you came from. I have friends here. I have built a life. My English is better than many native speakers, people tell me, as though that is the barrier and once you clear it everything else is simple. The language was never the hardest part. The hardest part is the references you do not share. The childhoods that happened somewhere else. The music, the food, the way grief and celebration look in the country you left. The way I can be in a room of people laughing at something and understand every word of the joke and still feel entirely outside it. I go home every couple of years. And here is the thing nobody tells you: going home stops being simple too. I am different now. The place I left has changed. My family loves me and they do not quite know who I have become in the years I was away. I do not fully know either. I exist in the gap between two places and I am not fully legible in either one. I think this is just the cost of the choice I made and mostly I believe it was the right choice. But some evenings, when it gets dark early and the city feels very large, I want my mother kitchen and the particular smell of it and the sound of the street outside and a version of home that no longer exists and maybe never did, because the home I am missing is made of memory and memory is not a reliable architect.