Loneliness is a normal human emotion

Mar 5

Loneliness is a normal human emotion

& we need to stop avoiding it.

*Alone doesn’t mean lonely and lonely isn’t bad.*

I think that being human is an inherently lonely thing. And almost everything we do is an attempt to escape that fact.

It’s lonely because we’re walking around in bodies that keep us feeling separate. That remind us that no matter how hard we try, I’ll never really know what it feels like to be in your body and you’ll never know what it feels like to be in mine. I don’t know what it feels like to be in your brain and you don’t know what it feels like to be in mine.

We try, though. We compare notes and swap stories and feel so utterly seen when someone puts into words something we’ve only felt in silence. We make art and music and poetry to help other people feel what we feel, like little treasure maps to our inner world.

We try to merge with other people and get lost in relationships and turn two bodies into one just to feel less lonely.

But what if loneliness isn’t the problem?

What if it’s pathologizing the loneliness and telling ourselves we’re the only one who feels it that is the very thing keeping us separate?

What if the loneliness is actually just an invitation to return back to the source?

The source being, love.

I’m not sure I’ve ever met a truly fulfilled person who didn’t know on some level that living from love is the only sane way to do this thing. And you can spot those people, not because their lives are perfect, but because there’s a lightness to them. Like they’ve figured something out and they’re generous enough to share it.

When I think about the loneliest moments of my life, I didn’t feel that way because I genuinely had no one. I felt that way because I’d believed the lie that I was separate from the world around me.

I’m a 35 year old woman who has been essentially single for ten years, apart from a couple situationships which I won’t count for the sake of this conversation (because let’s be honest, I felt lonelier in those dynamics than I did on my own). And for at least the last six years, I’ve found an indescribable amount of joy in my own company, and fulfillment in solitude where I used to find only pain.

So what changed?

I stopped trying to source my connection from unavailable people, and started sourcing it from the most abundant supply I could find: nature and spirituality.

I stopped believing that if I could just get someone to love me enough, then I’d finally fill that void. It’s such a tempting belief to adopt…it takes the onus off of us and plants it firmly in the hands of someone who can never get the job done, no matter how earnestly they try. People can love us with everything they have, and that love can certainly fill in some cracks, but it can never do the job of making us feel whole. It can never guarantee that we won’t feel the ache of loneliness again.

And when I finally realized that, I stopped trying to get other people to soothe the ache and started letting myself feel it more fully. I’d plant myself in the grass under the light of a full moon and sob at the terror of it all. I’d throw myself into waves on a Malibu beach and wail until I couldn’t tell the difference between my tears and the ocean anymore.

I gave every last tremble and pang in my body back to nature and said, “here, what about this one? Can you hold a pain this big?” And the answer was always a resounding yes.

You see, I think we’re in an epidemic of desperately trying to fix our feelings.

For a long time we weren’t allowed to have any at all. Going to therapy was stigmatized, crying got you labeled too sensitive, anger got you labeled as too difficult. And then the bittersweet wave of pop psychology on social media told us we were finally justified in needing to talk about our feelings…but then we jumped all too quickly to trying to regulate them. We’re using tools to bypass emotions instead of actually sitting with them and learning from them.

Loneliness in and of itself is not a bad thing. It’s just an emotion.

At the very least it just needs to be felt, and it might also provide us with some valuable information. Clues as to where we’ve been living in disconnection from our authentic self, or where we could stand to invest more in our community and relationships.

It’s not a shameful mark on our value as a human being, or a reflection of our unlovability. It’s just. an. emotion. One that we absolutely have the ability to be with, to get curious about. And maybe in doing that, we’ll find some healing for the part inside that is often quick to fall into unhealthy relationships as a means to avoid uncomfortable emotions.

Maybe if we stopped trying to escape our emotions, we’d find value in simply existing and feeling our way through life.

with love,

Megan

ps…if you want to learn more about calling love, authenticity and JOY into your life, you can work with me 1:1, follow me on TikTok for no BS advice, and even attend my 2026 retreat for women - it will change your life!

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