On Being a Lonely Person

I have always been a lonely person. In my recovery, I have both regained friends that I lost during my illness and made new ones, people whom I love deeply and can count on. I have also had a handful of meaningful romantic relationships, but deep in the folds of who I am as a person there is this pervasive sense of loneliness that follows me. These days I am the happiest I’ve ever been — have ever imagined being — and yet I still feel lonely most of the time. You might be imagining a montage of me sitting in a cold garret, staring wistfully out the window with the lyrics for “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel playing softy in the background. It’s not really like that, though. For me, loneliness is a sense of hyper-awareness that I don’t connect with that many people. I’m not particularly special, but I feel this disconnect between myself and other people.

It’s not difficult to pinpoint the start of this feeling since mental illness is so often the culprit. I developed severe OCD in the summer between elementary school and junior high, and to say that it gave me a different perspective would be an understatement. When you are eleven and battling a mental illness that kills full-grown adults, you start to feel like you are the only person in the world who is struggling. This is obviously false, since everyone has their own struggles that you don’t know about, but you don’t have that scope of…