Way back in the second half of 2014, I was feeling rather lonely. Well, in fact, that’s quite a large understatement. At that point in my life, I was very lonely and I was quite miserable too. My social events were months apart and my friends all seemed to be moving on with their lives. It made me very unhappy, to the extent that I can easily call it the lowest point of my life. It was often difficult to find the motivation to get up in the morning. I had no money and no job. I spent most of my time simply doing nothing, other than a brief couple of months doing unpaid work at a nearby Job Centre. Needless to say, that didn’t make me feel much better. It was just an endless feeling of emptiness. Nothing was really exciting or interesting to me and it was hard for me to believe that things would change.
Since then, I have reunited with those friends and have made new ones too. My current happiness levels are a thousand times higher than they were then. In retrospect, it was very obvious that such a thing would only have lasted for a short time, but my mind was clouded. I can’t hold it against anyone, because they all had their own lives to live and it would have been quite a lot of effort for them to go out of their way to visit me (I live in quite an isolated area.) Plus, few people would have really been aware that I was suffering: I was always so happy when I did get the opportunity to see anyone that they probably would have been quite shocked to find how unhappy I was after I’d left. They certainly wouldn’t have just assumed that that was the case based on my interactions with them either.
So what can I take from this horrible experience? Well, I can use it to try and improve myself. I don’t want anybody I know to suffer that pain, so from then on I have tried my hardest to do all I can to let people know how highly I value them. I’m not afraid to tell people I love them and to give speeches about how wonderful people are. If I haven’t seen someone in a long time, I’ll try to arrange to see them. If I can’t see them, I’ll still try to leave them with a positive impression. It’s upsetting to know that there must be so many people feeling as lonely as that and I will just try to do my best to ensure that nobody I care about ever has to feel that way.
