Can Loneliness Fuel Us?

Lonely But Not Alone

Our world is suffering with a loneliness endemic, but is it all bad?

Lonely but not alone. This is the title of Chapter 8 of my new book, Softening The Edge. A story of driving empathy into our workplaces and world, this book uncovers the perilous journey I took to lead a broken business to a thriving one with humanity at its heart, all whilst unpacking the deeply sad realities in our world. We only need to look around ourselves to see what that picture looks like. Anxiety levels are on an ever upward spiral, nearly 400,000 million people suffer with depression and we live with the deeply unsettling truth that the second biggest killer of our youth globally is suicide. When our children are killing themselves rather than choosing to stay on the planet with us, we have a problem. 

As we navigate the zigzag of the inconsistent world we live in today, we are very rarely entirely physically alone, but yet we have a loneliness endemic sweeping our planet, our workplaces and our homes. Living alone is not odd or unusual given we have approximately7.6 million households around the world that have just one person in them. What this means however, is that our communities, the places that us humans were created to thrive in, are no longer. We are deeply lonely, and it is killing people. Some statistics now show that loneliness may be more dangerous than smoking or obesity.

As a single mother, a mother that is committed to blazing an empathy trail, that I believe in with my entire soul, I am proof that this loneliness can however also fuel deep change.  Lone-dweller, single mum, solo traveler; our aloneness can create the tension and the space to see things that others are too distracted to see.

Painful as it may be to suffer through this lonely reality, following a pandemic that only deepened the claustrophobia of this emotion, I recently read something that reminded me why it is the pain really does lead to gain. Creativity, at its heart, is always fueled by turmoil. By disaster, by the unplanned intervention, by the hole forming where previously there was only smooth sailing. The quote I read was on the box of a Korean beauty product that had made its way to Dubai. Do you know what it said? It said, “great things never come from comfort zones.”

Indeed, it was the long-term lack of a comfort zone that led me to become an author myself. I grew up with a deep love for books and writing but I never planned to write one myself. Today as I continue to travel around the world, I bring my book collection with me everywhere I go. However heavy, and however many additional boxes of shipping it costs me, my books are first to be packed – carefully and sensitively piled up and wrapped up safely for the next chapter. Reading drives our empathy up; storytelling drives our humanity into focus and at their core books connect us. They remind us of stories and memories, of people and places we love, or that we imagine that we love. Books help us grow and learn and connect. It is ironic then that being an author is such a lonely road. 

When I think back to the writing of my book I have very few memories. It was as if the hours consumed me and the book wrote me rather than the other way round. Hours alone and in your own mind. As a writer I am fueled by people and by surrounding myself with culture, so the ‘aloneness’ of writing has always been offset by a vibrant noise of humanity around me. When I am sitting in a busy location, watching the world move before me, the words pour out of me without much conscious thought. The energy of the people fuels me. It is as if the reality of their worlds appear on the keyboard before my mind has caught up. 

The writing of my own book happened in exactly this way in South East Asia, a region that fuels my soul with a mixture of the tropical rain and sweet spicy tea that begin each day. By the time I needed to edit my book however I was alone, at home amidst a lock down as a single mother in a region without a single family member for over 5,000 Kms. Life as a working mum is a daily lesson in endurance, patience and tenacity. Life as a single working mum makes those realities ever more present. Life as a single mum with a global advertising agency to run and a book to write felt like a heavy reality to navigate at times.  An intricate dance to fulfil the needs of your team members, your children and your art every day in equal measure. It is a dance without any definitive end.

Today there are over two million households with single parents. We are definitely not alone and yet the loneliness continues. Am I lonely? For sure. But would I be the author and leader that I am today if I weren’t? Every cloud, as they say, has a silver lining.