Member-only story
The Unedited Truth About Feeling Lonely In A Big City
By Katie Mather
The weirdest thing about loneliness is how you always seem to feel it when you’re surrounded by too many people.
You live in a city of millions. It’s famous, it’s loud, it’s kind of disgusting sometimes, but it’s everything you knew you wanted to immerse yourself in.
It’s impossible to feel alone. It’s not a livable, breathable population of people — it’s cramped and occasionally suffocating. But you’re never physically alone. And it’s good — it’s comforting in its own, twisted way. It forces you to adapt quickly to the new environment.
You create routine and lifestyle. Both of which are designed to keep you going and going and going — just to get out of bed and to feign some purpose in your everyday. Your days fill up, you meet so many new people you begin to forget their names and refer to them only by their physical features and where you met them (“Grey striped shirt guy at that bar downtown”). You feel stuffed and numb to anything else.
But then, one day, you feel it.
It seeps into your consciousness. You’ll be doing something random and mundanely ordinary, like trying to choose a bunch of bananas at the Fairway two blocks away from your apartment, and you’ll feel it.
