Everyone is mad at ‘loneliness influencers’ for promoting isolation. I think we need to look deeper
When people hear I was an only child, they tend to have one question for me: “Weren’t you lonely?” It’s somewhat of a loaded query for a casual interaction, but I’ve learned to answer people with what I know they want to hear: “No, I loved it!” The truth, however, is more complicated. I did love soaking up all of my parents’ attention and never having to fight a sibling for the remote, but as a bookish kid perennially on the fringes of school’s social circles, I sometimes longed for company. It’s not that I had difficulty occupying myself (that’s what Lemony Snicket novels and Lizzie McGuire were for), but that I sensed, on some level, that it wasn’t entirely normal to spend as much time alone as I did.
I think about the difference between being lonely and being alone with some regularity now that I’m living solo after a big breakup with my live-in partner almost a year ago. I share my studio with a mean little Maltipoo named Frank about half the time, but when he’s with his dad, it’s just me and my books and my The Real Housewives of New York City reruns and my collection of vintage martini glasses and my slow-burning incense sticks. I do like this life—when I’m soaking in a bubble bath with a glass of orange wine, I’d even venture to say I love it—but there are times when I’m less sure, when I wonder if I’m somehow failing, or in fact fulfilling my only-child prophecy by not sharing my home with a partner or roommates anymore. And those are the moments when I tend to go on Instagram and catch up with the coterie of “loneliness influencers” I follow—or, as I prefer to think of them, my LonelyGirls.
One of the first loneliness influencers I was ever introduced to (via my friend Sarah, another single little-white-dog mom who also lives alone) was Lana Isa, or @lanasololife. She describes herself as a “friendless girl” and frequently films herself doing ordinary things—making waffle fries for dinner, returning Amazon packages to the post office, journaling—made somewhat less ordinary by the pride she seems to take in her utter independence, and her comfort in the I-live-solo silence I’ve come to know all too well.
