The Loneliness List: How To Reshape Your Lonely into Aliveness

How My Painful Insta Post In 2021 Compares Today And How I Began To Remedy That Alone Pang...

Aug 17, 2025

Loneliness…

There’s no feeling like it, right?

That emptiness inside… when you desperately need someone to be there.

Ultimately, when we’re left to face big things alone, at any age… we learn pretty quickly that, in a way, that’s all we’ll ever be.

Alone.

It’s only us that we ever truly have.

Everyone else, they come and go. And we lose everyone, or they lose us.

And it’s shit.

The “Selfishness” of Needing Others 🫠

I posted A LOT on Instagram between 2021-2024 about loneliness.

I soon became tired with the shame of feeling it. It spilled out into the only outlet I had - the Notes app, copied then pasted into Instagram captions under pretty wild swimming pics on my Water Wytch account.

As I wrote about it all, it felt like the very word itself was a badge of loser-ville, but I just couldn’t care anymore.

I know now of course, that loneliness is a silent epidemic which, as a society, is affecting so many — yet we’re all still so silent about it.

We’re currently in the loneliest century there’s ever been.

No one wants to admit we have no one.

I think society creates it as a feeling reserved for others — for ourselves, we plaster on a forced smile and try to crack on, rather than process it.

This denial only compounds it more.

We often don’t allow ourselves to admit it because we also don’t want others to feel guilty about the valid experience we feel. It wouldn’t take a lot for any friend or family member to feel bad that a loved one feels lonely.

“Brave”… or desperate?

Online I was told I was “brave”. A lot. Whether it was a photo of my plus-sized body in a wetsuit or swimsuit or because I was admitting what a lot of us truly felt.

I enjoyed no martyrdom in writing about loneless. If anything, it was an unconscious last-ditch-attempt at trying to get the people that loved me to, well, love me.

My pain couldn’t see that half of them didn’t love me at all (their words very much not matching their actions) and the other half had their own shit too.

Because when you’re in an unhealthy state (for a long period of time) and no one is filling that painful, unrelenting gap, you have no choice but to turn inward, self-absorbed, to try to fill it yourself.

It’s no one else’s responsibility to occupy your space and time. But we all hope that the company we love will want to occupy ours too.

It’s not always the case, I learned.

When it gets bad, you’re blinded to others’ lives too.

The bitterness poisons it all.

And, if you’re not careful, ironically, you then become someone that no one wants to spend time with anyway.

The Loneliness List was created leading up to Xmas 2021. I was struggling.

The Petrifying Void Of No One Pulling Up

I did a post in December 2021 called The Loneliness List.

It was the quickest list I think I’ve ever written (small fact, I am actually the Queen of Lists and The Bitch Of Bullet Points, so this is saying something).

Now, for those who have never read anything of mine, long story short - up until last year, I didn’t know that a few lockdowns and a big break up triggered a major reenactment of childhood trauma.

My loneliness was a bit fruitier, it transpired… neglect, loss, parentification and recovering from an abusive relationship was all mixed in to create one big misery mocktail.

The pain wasn’t merely “back on the dating scene” pains or Isolation Diaries 101. It was a petrified, young, alone… me.

I had broken.

Hundreds of hours and thousands of Great British pounds later, you’re reading someone who may not be completely healed of it all yet, but they’re damn-well nearly there.

And so, it made sense to review this, just to see how I feel with it now and to perhaps share learnings, just in case anyone reading this is feeling alone.

Don’t worry, there won’t be any of that “it gets better” bullshit…

The Loneliness List

I searched back to any photos taken one the same day that I wrote the list and I realised this was an incredibly hard one for me. No wonder I wrote about it all that day. A lot was going on, a lot of stresses as well as a break up but then as I was painting my kitchen cupboards (trying to stay productive and creative) I spilt the entire can of black paint over the kitchen floor. It finally broke me… hence the list!

Split now into three groups; Absence, Imbalance and Yearning for ease of reading.

Absence

1: Loneliness is clutching to pets when other humans aren’t able to prioritise you in that moment.
4: Loneliness is knowing that you’re loved but that they are so far away. At the same time… knowing that they are loved and your love is so far away from them.
6: Loneliness is knowing that the despair you feel will be the only company you can truly keep with you some days.
10: Loneliness is reaching out your hand to find no one willing to hold it.
11: Loneliness is the acceptance of absence. Over and over again.
12: Loneliness is the feeling of a ‘lack’; not measured in material or weighed by activity, but in the soul’s knowing that your time is only yours and others are spending theirs in other ways that aren’t you.
15: Loneliness is the existence of something not there.
16: Loneliness is a pain often without intention, weapon or choice.
18: Loneliness is a pain due to absence of positive emotion, stimulation or reassurance.

Imbalance

2: Loneliness is loving and accepting others that aren’t able to give it back.
5: Loneliness is when your effort and someone else’s doesn’t match, but you make do as some effort of theirs is better than none at all. So you exist within it, trying to absorb every piece you can.
7: Loneliness is knowing inequality when it comes to loving others.
8: Loneliness is the feeling of creating pattern, routine or worse, tradition, when you know that you just want others to be it instead.
17: Loneliness is a need that can only be met by two forces. One alone can only justify a yearning, the other creates and fulfils the intention.

Yearning

3: Loneliness is suffering in ways that you aren’t able to verbalise or illustrate, knowing that only you will ever understand your own specific thought and pang.
9: Loneliness is the most painful of wishes, never delivering in the moment you need it most.
13: Loneliness is as much not being, as being.
14: Loneliness is a yearn far removed from lust, vanity or greed. It is a yearning centred around that external assurance that right now, it’s ok and we are together.
19: Loneliness is sharp. It cuts. Cuts through the self. Tears and breaks through any notion of coping and thriving by one’s self.
20: Loneliness. Lonely. Alone…

The dreaded selfie of Dec 2021 - spot the misery behind the eyes.

Love Languages: Loneliness’ Kryptonite?

Reading it back, I get a sense of feeling exactly where I was. Talk about a few bullet points basically saying, “please won’t someone love me the way I need to be loved”.

Because that’s what I needed. And I’ll never be ashamed of the universal things we alllllll need.

Not someone’s time and attention, but conscious love languages spoken one side and correctly translated the other.

A Rose By Any Other Name, Could Smell Less Shit

I think if we stopped pitying the word “loneliness” (and all of its victims), worked consciously towards healthy loyalty and instead thought of it as emptiness, we’d be a lot more forthcoming in trying to support the filling of those spaces in the ones we love.

It’s never for us to fix someone else’s loneliness, but to be loyal to them as they figure out their needs, triggers and barriers to building back up.

I think that is bare bloody minimum.

Rock up with a bag of popcorn, a few favoured drinks, sit down with pieces of paper and make a strategy with them.

A workable, realistic plan.

The new boundaries needed, toxic friendships or family to cull, confidence building tools, dating profile creation, job searches, welfare applications, appointment bookings, medical enquiries and wellbeing plans…

Stick a film on, get the pens out, make the plan.

We don’t have to be doctors to heal, just witnesses to pain.

Does It Get Easier?

Loneliness hits us all different, some harder than others, especially when the love you beg for isn’t the love you get.

We can’t help what we need just as much as we cannot expect others to live our lives for us.

But all of this led me to the therapy I needed (and the life audit I needed even more).

Being let down led to break through.

So whilst there is often no pleasant gift during the loneliness, there is one hell of a rearview mirror once you’re over the wave.

And waves are guaranteed to ebb and to flow.

This rearview mirror shows you not just who you were in the pain, who was there for you, but also who you’ve now become because of it.

You were resilient, you were defiant, you were resourceful and most importantly, when it was the most excrutiating… you let yourself feel it and you let yourself rest too.

This can change your life.

For the better… if you shape it.

Now what?

Looking back at all of this, I stand by my list.

And I stand by the little girl inside who felt every bit of it too.

I ended that Insta caption with “To be lonely is to die whilst being alive.”

Pretty much sums up her total devastation.

But you have to rip muscle in order to grow it. The same goes for our souls.

I sit here, alone reading this list and writing this Substack tonight. During the night is usually the worst triggering time for me and I couldn’t feel more at ease in this very moment.

Humans. Can. Heal.

The emptiness I had, was filled with writing, illustration, new places to swim, a charity all my own, a boyfriend I love, a chihuahua to add to the doggo mix and pretty scars that mini-me is pretty damn proud of.

Loneliness isn’t always filled with people, it’s filled with more… YOU.

Create Your World And Charge For Admission

I wouldn’t lie to people and say, “it gets easier”, instead I would say “I got better”.

To be lonely is to admit that you live in other people’s worlds or realities… when the universe is begging for you to remember that you’re the monarch of your own.

Live in your own kingdom.

Bathe in expansion of new pursuits, play, dance, sing, scream… OWN your own time.

Own your time and only then, lend it to others.

There’ll be no relinquishing here.

There’ll be no lending of life.

There’ll be no waiting for others to align to you.

Only living.

And living fully.

Lilith

P.S - Want me to create a Loneliness Into Aliveness Plan Template? Message me or let me know in the comments x