It’s a really hard thing to do, to admit you’re lonely. ‘Admit’ being the operative word in that sentence. You admit blame. You admit defeat. You admit eating the last chocolate Hobnob. It’s a shameful act, to admit something. And to admit that you haven’t been able to foster human connections, for whatever reasons, is no different.
And so, last year, in the fourth hottest summer on record, I sat in my new house in a new town, with my new baby and my two-year-old son, and wept. For I had never been lonelier in my entire life and I had no idea what to do about it. But I certainly wasn’t going to say anything.
Loneliness is a pernicious emotion. The one thing you need is a meaningful human connection, someone you can talk to about how you’re feeling. And yet the shame and embarrassment of revealing that you don’t have that connection drives you to mask the problem. For me, it was also pride (“I’ve always had friends,” I said to myself. “I don’t want people to think I don’t have friends.”), not wanting to burden mates who have their life own pressures, not wanting to worry parents who live 300 miles away, and not wanting to add to the stresses of a husband who was already commuting three hours a day to support our tiny family. And on top of all that, it was simply too hot to leave the house.
So, instead, I sat on the floor of our lounge with a red-faced breastfeeding baby and an unbiddable, sweaty toddler in crippling 32 degree heat and I sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed.
Little did I know then that loneliness is actually incredibly common across every section of society and affects most of us at some point in our lives. And, that while I felt hideously alone, ironically, I belonged to a very large group. Research has shown that over nine million people in the UK (that’s nearly 14% of the population) report to be lonely. Statistically, that means that around 15 people in your train carriage, about 13,000 people in a packed Wembley stadium, and perhaps most alarmingly, someone in your close circle of family and friends.
The trouble is that we don’t talk about it. And we don’t want to talk about it, because it sets off a large flashing beacon above our heads that we’re potential social cyanide, someone to be avoided, already clearly rejected by the rest of society. So people suffer for weeks, months, sometimes years, and the problem exacerbates.
The late Jo Cox felt that loneliness was a problem that desperately needed addressing, and it’s off the back of recommendations from the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness that the Government published its loneliness strategy. It was appointed a Minister for Loneliness, Mims Davies MP, and set in motion the ‘Let’s Talk Loneliness’ campaign together with a whole host of charities including Mind, the British Red Cross, the Marmalade Trust, and the Co-Op Foundation.
It’s launching this week, to tie in with Loneliness Awareness Week (17-21 June), and its primary aim is to neutralise loneliness, to show it for what it is - a human emotion as normal and natural as joy, frustration and excitement - and by doing so, make it a more comfortable topic for people to talk about. Because by sharing our stories, using the hashtag #letstalkloneliness, we can see, if nothing else, that we’re not on our own no matter how alone we feel.
And, for me? Well, one day, I galvanised myself, smothered my two tiny, heat-rashed children in SPF50 and went to the park. And there was another woman there with two, tiny heat-rashed children smothered in SPF50. We moaned about the heat. We swapped numbers. We now hang out most weeks. That day was a good day.