If it’s difficult to respond to people in this state, it is harder still to reach out from it.  Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.  In her essay, Fromm-Reichmann returns repeatedly to the issue of incommunicability, noting how reluctantly even the loneliest of patiences approach the subject.  One of her case studies concerns a schizophrenic woman who asked to see her psychiatrist specifically in order to discuss her experience of deep and hopeless loneliness.  After several futile attempts, she finally burst out: ‘I don’t know why people think of hell as a place where there is heat and where warm fires are burning.  That is not hell.  Hell is if you are frozen in isolation into a block of ice.  That is where I have been.’

I first read this essay sitting on my bed, the blinds half-drawn.  On my printout, I’d drawn a wavering Biro line under the words a block of ice.  I was often feeling then like I was encased in ice, or walled up in glass, that I could see out all too clearly but lacked the ability to free myself or to make the kind of contact I desired.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Loneliness inhibits empathy because it induces in its wake a kind of self-protective amnesia so that when a person is no longer lonely they struggle to remember what the condition is like.

“If they had earlier been lonely, they now have no access to the self that experienced the loneliness; furthermore, they very likely prefer that things remain that way.  In consequence they are likely to respond to those who are currently lonely with absence of understanding and perhaps irritation.”

—Robert Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

What kind of solitude then remains? What want? Why do we make ourselves worse than children? And what do children do when they are left alone? They take up shells and ashes, and they build something, then pull it down, and build something else, and so they never want the means of passing the time. Shall I then, if you sail away, sit down and weep, because I have been left alone and solitary? Shall I then have no shells, no ashes? But children do what they do through want of thought (or deficiency in knowledge), and we through knowledge are unhappy.

Epictetus, Discourses

What solitude is, and what kind of person a solitary man is.

It’s curious to me, why people would find it sad or pathetic for a person to eat, shop, watch movies, or do any activity solo. I find it refreshing and liberating. Introverts are typically people who are recharged and refreshed by spending time alone, while extroverts derive their energy from others. You’ve met those social butterflies, always eager to run off to other plans and delighted with their full dance card. Myself, while I enjoy time with my friends, colleagues, and patients, I require time on my own to reflect, create, and meditate on the world around me, in order to promote emotional wellness.

Here’s Why Every Introvert Should Be Thankful For Who They Are

In certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure.  There are kinds of solitude that can provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.  Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge or following the East River all the way to the silvery hulk of the U.N., I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city.  I didn’t get this feeling when I was in my apartment; only when I was outside, either entirely alone or submerged in a crowd.

In these situations I felt liberated from the persistent weight of loneliness, the sensation of wrongness, the agitation around stigma and judgement and visibility.  But it didn’t take much to shatter the illusion of self-forgetfulness, to bring me back not only to myself but to the familiar, excruciating sense of lack.  Sometimes the trigger was visual – a couple holding hands, something as trivial and innocuous as that.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Alone in a crowd; hungry for company, but ambivalent about contact.”

—The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates.  He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity.  His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.

Solitude, a Return to the Self

“Tis not that a wise man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you that he should fly the very sight of the crowd: he will endure it if need be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone.”

—Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude