When did your loneliness really take hold of you?

[Tiina63]

I felt lonely as a child owing to having aspergers and not having siblings, then I had a couple of years in my late teens when I had no friends at all and when I entered the mental health system. However, I think that my bone deep loneliness really began when I was at university in my mid twenties. It felt that everyone suddenly saw me as this super brilliant person with no needs or feelings who was destined for a life of achievment. Inside all I wanted was to get married and have a family, but it seemed that everyone wanted to push me into living a life I was completely unsuited for emotionally and psychologically.
I am wondering if anyone here can pinpoint when things went off the rails for them and loneliness set in?

 

[Peaches]

dear Tiina, your words resonate completely with my experience.
My loneliness started in secondary school, when my parents were too busy moving out and running after each other (my mother running after my father with manic depression and paranoia) and they accidentally 'forgot' me at home for almost two years. We were middle class so no one sent social security to inquire why I wasn't going to school only once or twice per week, my mother would talk to the teachers and i would study a lot for short periods and make the grades in the end. At school anyway I was being bullied (once my whole class actually tried to stone me, you know, with stones) so I was trying to avoid it as much as possible.
I can honestly say that for around one year (from age 11 to 12) I spoke once or twice a week on the phone with my grandmother and otherwise I was completely alone at home, maybe some words with my mother about dinner, but that was it, because "she didn't want to worry me", so she would just spend the evening staring in the void and ignoring me completely, when she was sleeping at home, that is. I was too small to get a copy of the keys, so I couldn't go out by myself. It never occurred to me that I could call social security myself. After that period, I have never been the same, the social anxiety started and it took many many years to go back to half normal. And I get panic attacks if I am alone at home for more than a few days.

 

[Triple Bogey]

definitely in the sixth form at school between the age of 16 to 18 with me.
Before that I was always happy, always had plenty of friends, played out, played sports. I was shy and quiet but it didn't seem to matter.
When I got to 16 two things came into play - girls and beer. I soon discovered I didn't like drinking beer, I didn't like pubs and I didn't like getting drunk. So that alienated me from most people.
And all the other lads would chat up the girls and even though I tried I realized girls didn't like me. They would either laugh at me or ignore me. It was horrible finding out. The jobs I managed to get, everybody there hated me. I was treated like pure honeysuckle by everybody.

 

[Tiina63]

Peaches-I always welcome your responses to my threads as they are well thought out and we have had many of the same thoughts, feelings and experiences. I am shocked that you were stoned by your fellow students at school. This goes beyond some of the bullying I have had to go through and my heart goes out to you.
Triple Bogey-having things go downhill when adult life is about to begin or has just begun is something we share. It is so sad that at the time of life when we should have been at our most optimistic, the shadows were closing in.

 

[Triple Bogey]

Peaches-I always welcome your responses to my threads as they are well thought out and we have had many of the same thoughts, feelings and experiences. I am shocked that you were stoned by your fellow students at school. This goes beyond some of the bullying I have had to go through and my heart goes out to you.
Triple Bogey-having things go downhill when adult life is about to begin or has just begun is something we share. It is so sad that at the time of life when we should have been at our most optimistic, the shadows were closing in.

yes it wasn't nice. I would be in a pub with a group of people and they would turn their backs to me. I was always on the edge watching people talking and laughing. I tried plonking myself in the middle but people would still turn their backs. People smirked at me or laughed out loud. (Even at some job interviews !)

Those things have kept with me over the years. I am not like now, I don't take honeysuckle from people but there are places and events I won't go to. All because of what happened when I was 16 or so.

 

[Mike510]

I felt lonely for a while in high school. I had to change schools and I missed my old friends and the people I meet there didn't seem to want to know me. I felt a little better after high school but at times I felt lonely still. I found someone around the age of 21 who was perfect in everyway to me, she understood me in ways no one ever had before and we feel in love. After 2 and a half years I asked her to marry me and she accepted. We planned are honeymoon, looked at places to move in together, then she went silent. Didn't show me affection like she did before, seemed to almost be ignoring me. Then after two months of being like that I found out she was seeing someone else. That devastated me and I pretty much lost trust in anyone and felt like no one cares about me or wants to be with me unless it for an alternative reason. That has pretty much been my life for the past 8 months now

 

[Mr.YellowCat]

I guess it started to pile up after my last relationship, that is about 3-4 years back. I did not feel good even before, but as I did not seek no more relationships, loneliness arrived, and joined, maybe worsened, the state of my mind.
So for me, it was not one moment, but a longer process of piling it up, until it became clear that being lonely is a part of me.
So from a certain unspecified point I became "A lonely person".

 

[benj]

I've also always been quiet and in some senses a bit anxious, when I was in high school I got really anti-taking the piss out of people and stop hanging about with people that did. But then I got a really good group of friends who were close to me.
But then I moved away to university and had some good friends in my hours and a few others, but gradually started dropping friends - I smoked loads of weed for 5 years from mid highschool and it graduaelly made me paranoid and withdrawn on top of the anxiety I already had and differences in looking at the world to most ppl. HAd a psychotic breakdown part way through uni and just never really had the confidence to get along with ppl after that, my body language is all wrong. I met someone with a kid 4 years ago and that went well for a bit, now they're gone I'm worried I'll become fully lonely again but I think my social skills/ confidence have come back a bit, I can make people laugh sometimes, which is something I couldn't do ever or barely really talk to people, for about four years.

 

[thegreyman]

I didn't start to feel lonely for quite a long time, considering that friends were rare throughout my childhood. It probably dawned on me the most when I became old enough to go on holiday by myself, and then the solitude started to hit me hard.

 

[edamame721]

I've had different periods of time where I've felt lonely -- usually lasting a few years, but I have to say, I've recently become more so. This is owing to my good friends moving away and on with their lives, and my family growing older and apart. I'm actually quite frightened where I'll be in the next 5 years because I don't have a lot of things "settled" in my life. Things are stressful and I can't put in the proper time or stability to nurture new relationships.

 

[Mishka]

I was already lonely before I moved to a a whole new city. Now when I've been unemployed, I'm not studying and frankly don't have any routines to do, the loneliness has escalated even worse.

 

[rudechaos]

I was already lonely before I moved to a a whole new city. Now when I've been unemployed, I'm not studying and frankly don't have any routines to do, the loneliness has escalated even worse.

*hugs*

 

[el Jay]

It started during my really bad relationship a few years ago, a bit past the halfway point, which is when she started getting more emotionally distant and withheld intimacy and affection more and more, starting a terrible downward spiral. That was the point where it began hitting me, and I hadn't felt it since I was in school, being bulled, almost 10 years prior at that point. So I've only been living with this loneliness for a few years, but there's many more years of it that were built up but not expressing themselves since I was a kid.

It feels like that relationship single-handedly undid all of the work I had put into moving past the abuse and bullying I suffered as a kid, and put me in a much worse position to work from towards the future.

 

[Redwing]

It's really taken hold over the past year for me.