Eavesdropping on my Neighbors
"Loneliness is different than isolation and solitude. Loneliness is a subjective feeling where the connections we need are greater than the connections we have." Vivek Murthy
I’ve had some strange housing situations for most of my time in L.A. And by strange, I mean very uncomfortable. A memorable one was when I lived in this guy’s back house. It was a small building in his backyard. It had a single bedroom and a bathroom. There was a hot plate in the room and a small grill on the patio to cook my food.
The patio area was swarming with bugs in the summer. One evening I counted 40 bug bites on my right ankle. I’d eat after the sun went down, by the light of a citronella candle. If it was a clear night, I could spy the moon through slits in the canopy overhead.
When the November weather hit and I was grilling chicken with rain dripping down the back of my shirt, that’s when I moved out. I lasted five months in total.
One of the uncomfortable parts of living in someone’s backyard is hearing all of the neighbor noises. It wasn’t that they were annoyingly loud all the time. I didn’t hear hear husky, animal-like sounds in the early morning. It was just that their sheer presence made me feel more alone than I already was.
I’ll never forget one particular evening. I was sitting on my bed, probably feeling sorry for myself because I was a low paid babysitter at a fancy nanny agency for celebrities, and also experiencing the painful aftermath of my first ever breakup.
I remember the sounds of dinnertime emanating from next door: the clinks of cutlery hitting the plates, conversations around the table, dialogue and sweeping music from an old cartoon Disney movie. This soundscape made me want to visit the family next door, join them for the evening and have respite from my weird, depressing season of life.
To avoid going to pieces, I told myself that one day, I too would live in a proper home and not in some guy’s yard. I tried my best to hold myself in those moments of wanting something other than my own life very badly.
Fast forward to the present, and I think I’ve made some progress. Tonight, I had dinner with John at the table while the “Background Jazz” Spotify playlist played… well in the background. Our pup entertained himself in his pen, whining to go out every few minutes (potty training is improving slowly). We talked about things that mattered to us while we ate pasta with shrimp.
I used to think my loneliness correlated with all of my cockeyed living situations, especially when I started living on my own. The funny thing is, is that the ongoing lonely feeling hasn’t magically disappeared.
Sure, it’s not as prominent as it once was. It manifests itself differently now: it’s the frustration with my friends’ busy schedules. It’s the desire to travel and see long distance loved ones. It’s the impatience for John to get home from work at the end of the day.
I wish loneliness was normalized— like, you’re not a loser if you feel lonely. You’re a human who needs connection with other humans in order to function.
The tough thing is that chronic loneliness is damaging to the soul and the body. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy went on a tour across the U.S. to understand the role of loneliness in people’s lives. What he found was that its impact on people’s health was far greater than some of today’s leading health risks. It’s shaping people’s lives on individual and societal levels.
I hesitate to be an alarmist, so I’ll say that at the very least, talking about one’s loneliness to someone else and for the other person to empathize with the feeling, is a relief.
Seeing that we’re not alone in this painful emotion makes the nights where we’re holding ourselves easier to get through. It makes it less daunting to reach out to friends even if we feel insecure about it for a million reasons. It illuminates the shadows behind the shiny social media posts about people’s weekend plans. It emboldens us to simply keep trying, no matter the stumbling vulnerability we inevitably show in our quest to connect with other people.