Loneliness, Covid and Community
Community. What does it mean to you?
To me, there are associated words that come up when I think of community. I think of people. I think of warmth. I think of closeness, togetherness. I think of a sense of belonging. It’s what we lack so crucially in times like these. Coronavirus, and the associated restrictions have closed off some of the most wonderful spaces for community building and maintenance. Restaurants and bars, cafés, libraries, museums, even our own homes. These have all been closed off, and some of us have even been told to stay in our homes unless absolutely necessary. This entire period of isolation has brought two things into focus for me: loneliness, and it’s antidote, community.
So let’s start with loneliness. We don’t like to talk about it. I certainly find it terrifying to mention to someone that I’m lonely. My first instinct is to hide that fact as well as possible, and put on a brave face. The reason for that is simple: I don’t want to scare off the very people that could help me feel less lonely. But loneliness remains a fact in my life. And also, people can usually tell when there’s something more happening than what is being said. The more intense the feeling of loneliness, the stronger the urge to hide it, and the more isolated I feel. It shows when I spend time with even my closest of friends, and I’ve had the experience of being called toxic, when really, I was just feeling crushed under the weight of my loneliness, and I didn’t know how to express any normalcy under that weight.
In short, loneliness has always been a show of weakness, for me. So, I’ve tried to hide it. But why? Why do I hate to show that I’m lonely? Does it mean that there’s something wrong with me? Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe we’re all individually afraid of admitting that we feel lonely, and we all feel isolated in our inability to express this feeling. But then, wouldn’t that mean that we’re actually a community of people who feel lonely?
Maybe there is a large number of people willing to just sit and talk about the one thing they know for sure that they have in common: loneliness. Is that not a good place to start a connection? I feel lonely, you feel lonely, why don’t we sit together and chat for a while. It seemed simple enough to me, so I went on Meetup.com, an incredible place to find like-minded people, and talk about something you all have in common. I looked for loneliness support groups. There were a few support groups, one for LGBTQ+ people in Montreal, which I highly recommend (SafeBox), and another for people with depression or bipolar disorder (Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, Montreal). There is a wealth of groups on Meetup to help with the incredible loneliness that this pandemic has exacerbated, and many groups have adapted their meetings so that they take place online. The two groups that I have mentioned are certainly doing that.
But that was not exactly what I was looking for. I’m not sure if it was a realistic hope. Loneliness is so vague, and people have such different ways of dealing with it. For example, for a good while, I was relying heavily on meditation to cope with loneliness. I thought that I would feel well once I could be well even by myself, so I put all of my efforts at a very difficult period in my life, which lasted about two months, on meditating my loneliness away. I believed that there was something within me to heal, and once that was done, the pain I felt from utter isolation would go away. But it didn’t. Meditation certainly helped me cope with my loneliness, and I do believe that some periods of isolation call for introspection. Meditation is a great tool for introspection and self-reflection. But I don’t think that all cases of isolation and loneliness can be resolved through introspection. Again, I recommend meditation anyways, because it is a wonderful exercise, and doing it regularly can help with a ridiculously long list of issues. There are also more ways than one to meditate, and it does not need to be done in isolation.
So, given that there are no support groups that I know of dealing with loneliness per se, I started to speak about it with people that I saw regularly. I told my family members that I felt lonely, and even expressed it to my friends. It didn’t have a life-changing effect, and it was tough at first. But I saw that I was not the only one, and even when people couldn’t relate, they offered to meet with me more often, or to check in on me once in a while. It’s important to say that, if it was not easy to accept the beautiful gift of company and attention, it was because it hurt my pride. But by then, I the pain of loneliness largely outweighed the damage to my pride, and I gladly accepted every bit of help offered. Now, it’s possible that not everyone’s experience will be the same when reaching out to others, but there are usually some people in all our lives who have some capacity for friendship. It doesn’t need to be one-sided: we can return the favor when our cups are no longer empty, and we can pour into other cups. If you’re reading this, and you are thinking that your cup is already full, then please use this as an excuse to someone who may be feeling isolated right now.
Finally, this leads me to tonight, when I was thinking of the concept of community. We often say that the Western world promotes individualism, and living in isolation seems to be the norm in large cities, as far as I know. But this does not need to be the case. We can reshape societies in a way to share more. Sure, we’ll have to give up some of our own preferences in order to achieve this. Take Denmark’s co-housing projects for instance. “In Danish co-housing communities, multiple families live on a plot of land, or even in a single building, where certain chores and benefits are shared by everyone.” You can find out more about these projects in Happy (a documentary, link below). The truth is that we can’t achieve this kind of living without giving up some of our freedoms. But we stand to gain so much more, and to me, loneliness seems more restricting than a supportive community. We live in houses next to one another. Why don’t we become more than just neighbors?
I’m increasing the scope of my personal problem to the societal level, because I believe that we share a desire to be together, and to belong. We can live better by living in communities, and sharing what we have with others. People’s skills and resources can complement one another, and most importantly, we can feel less alone. The reality of such a dream is not that far. We can already transform our living spaces to create room for communal living. We would have to share, and make decisions together, but we would be more resilient than we are as individuals, or even as couples. This resilience would in turn allow us to make better decisions, which come not from a place of scarcity but from a place of abundance. Such a project would take planning and time, and starting it during a pandemic is not ideal. But it’s precisely during a pandemic that we can start planning for a future where we would not be forced into isolation, simply because society is built that way.
It seems clear to me that these projects, and other ones like it, will take a long time to come to any fruition. I find the idea of living in a community by choice a beautiful one. But it may be that not everyone agrees. It will certainly be challenging to create a movement to grow communal-living projects . Until a time when places live in community are common and accessible for everyone, we can work on smaller projects to alleviate loneliness and isolation. I want to do my part, and I have started a group (link will be posted below soon). The group will be called Montréal Loneliness Support Group, and it will be exactly that. If enough people are interested, I will maintain the group, and organize the meetings. If you are interested in working on this project with me, please comment below or join the group and message me.
Happy documentary clip on co-housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cleTzREJNs
Entire Happy Documentary: https://www.thehappymovie.com/
Or on Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwLityTjQfE
Meetup Group: [Waiting for approval from Meetup]
