Our theme for the month of June is “older and wiser.” Writers were asked to write a response to one of their previous pieces. Today, Tiffany responds to her June 2023 post, “On Being Young and Lonely.”
In the last year, my friend in grad school has made friends in her department. She’s joined a soccer team, she’s starting a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and she goes rock climbing with a regular crew of goofballs. But while she never says it, and I don’t know if she ever could, I can tell that she feels something is missing.
My old roommate moved to another city for work, and she’s living with her best friend. She’s started dating a kind man who loves Star Wars and swing dancing, and she always tells stories about how her coworkers advocate for her. But when she talks about being away from her family, I can hear the ache in her chest.
I’ve been trying to be more intentional about spending time with my roommate. For a few months, our schedules were never in alignment, and I was always worn out by my social schedule. During this time, it was like I lived alone. I came home to an empty apartment, ate my meals in silence, and went to bed without saying a word to anyone. For a while, I found it refreshing. For a while, I found it held my peace.
But in the last couple of months, we started having biweekly roommate hangouts, and we caught up on our work lives while playing Rummikub. It’s such a simple tradition, but I find myself looking forward to it every other week, and I realized that my roommate was healing a loneliness in me that I didn’t know was still there.
I used to hope that—if I found the right person or if I found just the right number of people—that I would never feel lonely again. I’m finding that it’s much more complicated than that, and I can still feel lonely in more ways that I knew. I have the most amazing partner, but I still miss my sister. I am so blessed to have so many wonderful friends, but I still miss having a community.
Loneliness is such a strange beast. It ducks and dodges and shapeshifts and shows its face when you least expect it. Frankly, if everyone’s loneliness is this evasive, I’m not surprised that we’re in what people call a loneliness epidemic. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just being greedy or taking people for granted, but my loneliness is an echo from a silent sound, a shadow with an invisible caster. Its presence is a puzzle I have to solve, not a self-imposed wish list.
I wonder if it’ll ever go away, which might be like wishing away happiness or anger or any other feeling that’s an integral part of life. But I also look at my parents and my coworkers in their thirties, and they don’t seem to struggle with it. Loneliness might make an appearance, but it doesn’t haunt them in the same ways. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being lonely, but I feel reassured that it’ll get easier. It already has, so I have to believe it will.
Tiffany Kajiwara graduated from Calvin in 2022 with majors in literature and writing. Now, she continues to live in Grand Rapids and works at Baker Academic Publishing as a marketing assistant. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, thrifting, and psychoanalyzing cartoon characters.
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This made me smile. From a fellow young person who once felt lonely, still occasionally feels lonely but encouragingly less so (entering my thirties), it will definitely get easier 🙂