Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude - Softcover

White, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061765104 ISBN 13: 9780061765100

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2011

Synopsis

Despite having a demanding job, good friends, and a supportive family, Emily White spent many of her evenings and weekends alone at home, trying to understand why she felt so completely disconnected from everyone. In this insightful and soul-baring memoir, White recounts her struggle to comprehend and overcome her chronic loneliness, a debilitating condition that she contends deserves the same attention as depression and other mental difficulties. Interweaving her personal story with cutting-edge scientific research—as well as incredibly moving accounts offered by numerous lonely men and women—White provides a deep and thorough portrait of this increasingly common but too often ignored affliction.

About this title

About the Author:

Emily White is a former lawyer who now works as a writer and policy analyst. Her work on loneliness has appeared in the Guardian, the Huffington Post, ELLE (UK), the New York Post, and the Daily Mail. She lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
PREMONITION
Waiting for the state to strike


I’ve had periods of loneliness my whole life. Since research shows a genetic basis for loneliness, with some people being born with an ingrained tendency toward the state, I now see these periods as natural, almost inevitable. Or, rather, I see them as inevitable from the perspective of the adult I’ve become. I’m the sort of person who likes to play “What if?” What if I hadn’t dropped physics? What if I’d married my first boyfriend? What if Henry Ford had mass-produced bicycles instead of cars? And I can engage in this sort of shuffling and reshuffling of reality when it comes to my loneliness. I can daydream about a childhood in which my sisters and I were closer in age, and my parents stayed together, and my whole family remained in the South. In this way, I can whip up an alternate version of my life, one in which my genetic predisposition toward loneliness doesn’t slam up against the experience of early isolation.
 
But the fact is that I was a solitary child born into circumstances that saw me too much alone. I don’t mean that I was friendless. One of the overriding ironies of my life has been that, although I’ve struggled with loneliness for years, sociability has rarely been a problem for me. I grew up with much older sisters—Christine and Theresa were ten and eight years older than me—and while the age gap set us apart, it also meant I had the benefit of role models. By the time I was nine, I had the manners of a much older child. I knew how to be polite with parents, deferent with teachers, and funny with friends. I had a best friend—a beautiful Trinidadian girl with the pretty name of Stacey Lea—and other girls used to crowd around me in the schoolyard, asking if they could be my second best friend, or my third. This sort of flattery never made me disdainful or vain, and that’s because the isolation that characterized the other aspects of my life worked to keep my little ego in check. I’m not sure exactly when I became conscious of my motivations, but I realized fairly early on that the reason I was better than other girls at making friends was because I needed those friends more acutely.
 
This was something the kids around me didn’t seem to notice. Stacey, for instance, had a big, sprawling house. It was a bungalow that had sprouted additions as the family grew and grew, and the erratic architecture made it an ideal place for playing, with an unfinished attic, blind spots in the yard, and dead-end hallways that could be cordoned off with sofa cushions. Stacey used to like a game where we dared each other to climb into a crawl space under the kitchen—it was a damp and gravelly spot that smelled of soil—and she never seemed to realize how uncomfortable the game made me.
 
“I’m here,” she’d call out, as I cringed with nerves at the entrance, afraid she might just disappear. “I’m putting my clip down as a marker. You have to pass it,” she’d say victoriously, emerging from the crawl space with dirt in her hair and cobwebs stuck to her sweater. And I could never do it. A foot or two into the crawl space, with daylight just an arm’s length away, I’d panic, and scurry back out. “You have no guts,” Stacey would say dismissively, already forgetting the game and heading up to the kitchen, and I’d follow along, patting the big German shepherd that slept on the stairs and not letting on how frightened I’d been.
 
Because what Stacey didn’t know—and what she, with five brothers and sisters, would probably never understand—was that I had a fear of empty places, a fear that I recognized as embarrassing and irrational even at ten. There seemed to be two versions of my life. There was the public version, which saw me eating cabbage rolls at Stacey’s huge dining room table, playing dodgeball at school, and reading the notes that the girl behind me would slip over my shoulder in class. And then there was another version, the one which I think my friends’ mothers detected but which no one ever mentioned. This other me, this private me, saw me on my own a great deal of the time—unlocking the back door after school and calling out to the cat for company, or going to the corner store on my own, or sitting on the back porch in the early evenings and fiddling with marbles when the empty house became too dark and scary.
 
In many ways, I had it easy as a kid. Not only was I popular, but my family was reasonably affluent, and I saw none of the abuse or put-downs that some of my other friends had to deal with. The difficulties I faced had nothing to do with people behaving badly toward me and had everything to do with people not being there at all.
 
The 1970s—which saw families start to seriously fall apart—also witnessed the beginning of the vogue for family trees. My third-grade teacher had a particular fondness for these creations—they must have eaten up a lot of class time—and she made us cut leaves out of bristol board and glue them onto painted trunks and branches. There wasn’t a lot of sensitivity, within the Catholic school system in the mid-1970s, to the fact that some family trees had blown apart, and I had to muster all of my precocious social skills to deal with the challenge.
 
“Mrs. Twaite,” I said, holding a “Mother” leaf and a “Father” leaf. “What if they’re not on the same tree anymore?”
 
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Twaite answered. I blushed, and Mrs. Twaite seemed to come to her senses. My sisters and I were famous—we were the “divorced kids”—and Mrs. Twaite was clearly unsettled by our lack of conformity.
 
“Maybe you can create a second tree,” she said uncomfortably.
 
I looked around the classroom. There was no way I was going to have two trees when everyone else just had one, so I defiantly glued “Mother” next to “Father.” I liked the way the tree looked—with the mommy and daddy leaves hovering protectively over the little kid leaves—but when I hung it up on the wall, I knew it was a lie. I had no memory of ever seeing my mother and father together, and when I thought about our family tree, I pictured something being dismantled, like the artificial pine my mother and I took apart every Christmas.
 
It hadn’t always been that way. There seemed to be two families in my family. First, there was the intact unit that my sisters had spent their childhoods in. This was in Kentucky, before the move to Canada and the divorce. This grouping had seen my sisters and parents living in a big white house in Lexington, on a street with the magical-sounding name of Sycamore Road. My mother kept a photo of this house tucked in a drawer in Toronto, and I used to study it when I was little. I’d look at my sisters standing in matching white dresses on the sunny front steps, at the big oak tree in the corner of the frame, and the edge of my father’s shadow in the foreground. There was a peacefulness to this portrait that mesmerized me. I always tried to insert some image of myself into the frame—perhaps looking out from an upstairs window—but I could never fully convince myself that I belonged in the picture. And that’s because, even though I held the photo in my hand, the move to Canada seemed to have ripped its contents in two. Perhaps the absence of aunts and cousins had revealed fault lines within their marriage, but—for reasons that were never explained to me—my parents split up shortly after the move, when I was four. The divorce meant that I saw my father only on Sunday afternoons, and that I saw my mother barely at all. Confronted with the sudden demands of single parenting, she had to hustle for work, and she ended up teaching English as a second language to other newcomers at a college downtown. Her hours, as well as the long commute, meant that she was often not at home, and her absence meant that I had to be self-sufficient.
 
“You never gave me any trouble,” my mother said fondly, years later, and what she really meant was that I could get by on my own. I relied a lot on Theresa for company in my early childhood—Christine left for university when I was eight—but, as we grew older, Theresa became understandably preoccupied with boyfriends and band rehearsals. By the time I was nine, I’d become adept at entertaining myself. In many ways, it was something I was good at. The relationship between loneliness and solitude can be hard to delineate: the former is often seen as canceling out the legitimacy of the latter, as though a lonely adult or child is simply not entitled to want or need time alone. But the feelings of isolation that accompany loneliness are entirely different from the more sated and creative feelings that accompany solitude, and it’s entirely reasonable to feel lonely and yet still feel as though you need some time to yourself.
 
“If you don’t want to stay, say yes,” my mother would quietly instruct me, when I called from a friend’s house to ask permission for a sleepover. My mother liked time alone as much as I did, and she never criticized my desire for solitude.
 
“Yes,” I’d reply, trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible.
 
“Sorry, hon,” she’d say more loudly, “I need you at home tonight.”
 
And when I got home to find my mother there, I’d be entirely happy to lose myself in daydreams about being the Hardy Boys’ little sister, or I’d just lie on my bed and listen to my mother writing letters and diary entries on the big electric typewriter downstairs.
 
The problem was that the sol...

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0061765104
• ISBN 13: 9780061765100
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 338