I Can Spend a Whole Day Talking and Still Feel Completely Unmet by Night

Dear Delyara, This is what loneliness means for me now. Not silence. Not empty rooms. Not having no one. I speak all day. To children, to people at work, to shop assistants, to the school, to my husband, to family, to strangers in polite practical ways. My life is full of language. And yet by bedtime, I can still feel that no one has reached the exact place inside me that most needed tenderness, witness, or emotional accuracy. That is a different kind of loneliness than I knew when I was younger. Back then, loneliness felt like absence. Now it often feels like imprecision. People interact with me. They need me. They appreciate me. Sometimes they even love me. But being loved and being emotionally met are not always the same thing. And I think I have been starved more by that difference than I wanted to admit. I don’t know how to ask for the kind of closeness I mean without sounding unreasonable. So often I just carry the hunger silently and keep answering everybody else’s questions as if that is the same thing as connection. It isn’t.