Sometimes I feel lonelier after talking than before I spoke

Dear Delyara, That is one of the strangest forms loneliness takes for me now. It isn’t about not being around people. It’s about giving a version of myself to a conversation and feeling, as it happens, that the version reaching the other person is smaller or flatter or more edited than the truth I came in carrying. So the conversation ends, and instead of feeling relieved or accompanied, I feel more distant from the world than before. I don’t think people realize how tiring partial contact can be. Surface-level closeness does not always soothe. Sometimes it sharpens the awareness of what still remained untouched. That is the kind of loneliness I keep circling back to — not empty rooms, but rooms where I cannot quite arrive whole.