This piece stems from a reflection on my college experience. College is often advertised as “the best years of your life.” The years when you’re totally immersed in a vibrant social sphere with other young people in the prime of your life. You’re supposed to party, make mistakes, live in communal housing, meet your lifelong friends and maybe even the significant other you end up marrying.

​

My college experience was very different from this - and not just because my third year was interrupted by a global pandemic (but we’ll come back to that later). I struggled to make lasting friendships in college. As a result, I spent two of my four years living completely alone. And the other two years, in which I lived with a complete stranger and then a close friend, crashed and burned in ways that left me feeling more lonely. 

​

Rather than experiencing the joys of communal living and close friendships, my college experience was overshadowed by learning to navigate my solitude and manage my loneliness. And I got pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself. I learned a lot about myself and grew as a person (but then again, doesn’t everyone in college?). But then a global pandemic hit (see, I told you we’d get back to this) and I felt like I was back at square one. 

​

The new risk of infection posed by any act of in-person socialization obliterated my usual strategies for being happy on my own. Suddenly it wasn’t so easy to reach out and make plans with a variety of friends. I didn’t have Friday and Saturday night plans to look forward to while grinding through the rest of my week. I couldn’t maintain connections with my busy friends through noncommittal study-dates and lunch-dates anymore. Most strikingly, I wasn’t afforded the same graces that my friends living in together were. No one expected people to isolate from their housemates, so those friends still got to see each other. But since I lived alone and had the option, I was supposed to stay away.

​

For the first time I was facing what it would mean to be truly and actually alone. I was so terrified by the potential enforced isolation of a two week quarantine that I adopted a cat. And I wish I could say that I’ve now officially found the Cure to Loneliness™, but I haven’t. Don’t get me wrong, the cat definitely helped. And so has therapy. But I still get lonely. And I don’t think that will ever completely go away. And I’m no longer sure that’s an entirely bad thing.

​

I didn’t want to write a piece specifically about my college experience or about the pandemic. But I think that these influences are important to acknowledge, because they add to the exigency of this piece. For years before the Coronavirus pandemic, mental health professionals and social scientists have been describing an epidemic of loneliness, especially among younger generations. The constant but empty digital connections and comparisons fostered by social media are often cited as the cause. But with a majority of elderly Americans spending a majority of their waking hours alone, I have a hard time believing that loneliness is only epidemic among young, social media obsessed populations. Like it or not, loneliness - or at least a state of “alone-ness” - seems to be an integral part of the human experience, which has only been heightened by the current physical isolation imposed by the current pandemicized state of the world.

​

My experiences have made me think a lot about what it means to be alone and what it means to be lonely. In this piece, I set out to investigate these states that are often confused as synonymous. I tried to approach the difficult topic of loneliness from a number of perspectives, including my own, and to convey my complicated thoughts in a way that would make such a taboo topic engaging and approachable to readers.

​

Finally, my decision to include billy’s [sic] story as a guiding force in this piece was motivated by 1) my reluctance to fully center myself and 2) the connection I feel with billy despite never having met. Just like I didn’t want to write about only the pandemic, I didn’t want to write a piece that relied solely on my experience. I am painfully aware that my ability to live alone during college comes from my privilege. Even though living alone was never my first choice, it was still a choice. Many people who may want to live alone, or at least avoid potentially awkward roommate situations, may not have the means to do so. Same with adopting a cat and with going to therapy. I am infinitely grateful for the ability to make these choices in my life, so I didn’t want to write a piece that complained about my upper middle class problems. Instead, I chose to center billy, who is reputed to live off an income of roughly $5,000 a year and has far more authority on true solitude than I do.

​

Plus, as I was researching his life for this piece I began to feel a strong kinship with billy - despite the fact that we’ve never met and likely never will. As I share in the essay, his opinion of his college experience in 1972 mirrored how I felt about my own despite the 49 year time difference. Then, as I dug deeper and found smaller, more niche points of connection (like our shared love of not only rom-coms, but specifically Bollywood movies) that sense of connection only grew. I’ve come to cherish billy’s story much like one might cherish the story of their grandfather, possibly because I never got to know either of my own grandfathers’ stories so well, but mainly because I just liked it. While I would have loved to take advantage of our Zoom and email-filled world to interview billy myself for this piece (mainly to compare our reviews of rom coms, but I guess we also could have talked about loneliness a little), I didn’t get around to it before the arbitrary deadline of my graduation. I would like to think that maybe someday I’ll send this piece to billy to see what he thinks and maybe we’ll end up having that conversation over a cup of tea. But in the meantime, I hope that what I’ve learned about his life through research adds a valuable dimension to this peace and also makes readers love his story, and him, as much as I have. 

​

Trying to write something that would also do justice to the story of a person I so admired also helped my lonely, exhausted, senioritis-infected pandemic brain get through even the roughest parts of the writing process. This piece was not easy to write. In fact, at one point, I physically cut it up with a pair of scissors before taping it back together in an order that made more sense. Despite it being one of the worst possible times to try to be creative (re: a year plus of global pandemic), this topic was almost too difficult, too close to home to write about at times. So in closing this author’s note I’d like to thank all of the people who helped make my arduous writing process less lonely. Thank you to my writing group (read: Capstone Emotional Support Group), Ellie Scott and Kaitlyn Ender, for being both an outlet for some much needed commiserating and a source of equally as needed positivity. Thank you to my friends and fellow peer writing consultants, Julianna Morano and Sharon Lin, for their after-hours input on my writing and website design. Thank you to Shelley, my mentor and cheerleader (because boss and instructor are much too impersonal terms), for believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. And finally, thank you to my mom and dad, who always have my back.