Loneliness - you might not even realise it by Stephen Dennett

Before the pandemic hit, I don’t think I’d ever have thought of myself as lonely. Yes, my mental health had been pretty dreadful for a few years, so I was familiar with the depression and anxiety making everything that bit harder – but lonely? Not something I’d ever thought about. Having not had a moment to myself bringing my daughter up (for what seemed like an eternity) I thought I had learnt the true value of taking time to do nothing. I was quite happy to spend time just with myself.

I don’t know if I appeared lonely to other people. I got divorced for the second time a couple of years ago, so at home it’s just me and my daughter, and she’s away at university most of the time. I don’t have too many close friends, and all but two of them are spread out all over the country – and my extended family are located far and wide so, much as I love them, I rarely see them. 

Whether it was apparent to other people or not, I think I was only a very few steps from loneliness – and then a few things happened almost on top of each other.

It can be more than one thing….

·        Firstly, I bought a big house so I could move my parents in – they were getting a bit older so I thought it would help. It turned out that my Dad’s dementia was much worse than we’d known, and that my Mum had pretty much broken herself supporting him. Within months they were both in a care home – Mum died soon afterwards, and Dad had a stroke, adding an inability to speak to his deteriorating memory function. I don’t think there’s anything that could have pushed me further towards loneliness than the realisation that the two people who had supported me throughout my life just weren’t there anymore, whether physically or mentally.

·        Secondly, lockdown happened. It took me a very long time before I worked out that maybe, just maybe, losing the social interaction of being in the office was the reason I’d gone from having about one anxiety attack a month to having about two a week. I’d just walk away from my laptop and have to hide my head under a pillow for a few hours. I was having to work at weekends to make up for the time I lost during the week – not to mention the disruption to the team, not knowing when I’d disappear off the face of the planet for half a day.

·        Thirdly, my psychiatrist told me I’d probably benefit from some broad-spectrum talking therapy – and the therapist I found turned out (for better or worse) to be very insightful. After maybe 15 sessions, picking over just about anything and everything from my life, she came up with something startlingly obvious – that from a point about a year or two after leaving university I had just stopped making close friends – that all the people I could genuinely call friends were people I’d known since before about 1997. I wasn’t in contact with any of the parents of the kids Beth (my daughter) went to school with, or with anyone from the places I’d worked. I’d had friends at the time, but none of those relationships close enough to survive a relocation or a move to a different job.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me – everyone experiences such difficulties in their lives from time to time, and of course everyone suffered the effects of the pandemic - but suddenly, with all three of the things above weighing down on me, I was astonished to find that I suddenly felt crushingly lonely.

I don’t cry – not at weddings, not at sad films (not even if the dog dies) – but the morning after that therapy session I sat on my sofa and sobbed – I mean, properly sobbed – for hours. Two very concerned dogs spent most of that time trying to climb on top of my head.

….but recognising loneliness is the first step to dealing with it

That was my ‘rock bottom’. And I think, somehow, I needed it. Nothing had changed for me just at that moment – I hadn’t become a lonely person that day – but I suddenly saw where I was, and that it was a very lonely place. I couldn’t get that word ‘lonely’ out of my head – it felt novel, utterly unexpected.

Little by little though, I started managing to make some tiny changes (or at least, my therapist told me to make them). A Zoom call with one of my cousins here; an arrangement to meet up with an old mate from university there; golf with my stepson occasionally.

I also - and this is crucially important - told some people at work. And those people, miraculously (or so it seemed to me), wanted to help. My boss got into a habit of just randomly calling me to see how I was doing – sometimes on a work-related pretence, sometimes not. My two most longstanding colleagues at Mazars started dropping ‘catch-up’ appointments into our calendars - Teams calls for the three of us to just chat – not about work, but similar to the way we would have sat around and chatted in the office, maybe just about what was the latest Netflix series to watch... I lost count of the number of people who told me they were here if I felt I needed to talk. And for small things like that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

Try it – try talking to someone - you might be surprised at how much people want to help once they understand what is going on for you. Remember that, however confident the people around you appear to be – that’s just what they are showing to the world – there will be all sorts of things going on for them that just don’t show. So, whatever you are feeling, other people won’t know – or at best they’ll maybe have an inkling but will be nervous about raising it with you in case they’ve got it wrong.

Oh, and pets – pets really help. They may annoy you with their rapacious desire for food/attention/destruction, but mine have given me someone to talk to even if there’s no-one here, and I have to leave the house at least once a day to walk the dogs. It helps.

Written by Stephen Dennett, Director - Intellectual Property Tax