I sat at a family table and felt like the most emotionally distant person there

Dear Delyara, Everyone was talking. Food was moving around the table. There were questions, opinions, little jokes, the usual passing of things from one hand to another. From the outside it would have looked like connection. From inside me, it felt like distance wearing the clothes of family life. I don’t think anyone was excluding me. That’s what makes this kind of loneliness so difficult to explain. It isn’t caused by one clear act. It grows in the gap between being included functionally and being met emotionally. I can answer questions, smile, pass the salad, remember whose tea needs sugar, and still feel profoundly untouched in the places where loneliness actually lives. Sometimes I think the hardest loneliness is not absence of people. It is presence without accurate contact. That is where I was last Sunday.