Dealing with loneliness
For all our talk of postgraduate community, there will always be times when community cannot be found. Even the most social of us will find times where we are just not able to find anyone to spend time with. This can sometimes be tough. I for one am someone who actively needs to spend time alone and I can still easily find myself feeling isolated and lonely. We’ve talked about how we might alleviate these issues. But what about when there isn’t any alleviation to be found? How do we deal with being alone?
The short answer is that this partially depends on the person in question – but I know that’s boring and unhelpful! What I’m going to suggest in this post helps me and that’s frankly the best I’m going to be able to do. But I hope it can at least give people ideas on how they might combat loneliness problems.
The first thing is to remember that it is fine to be alone. The worst part of being alone can be the anxiety surrounding it: we create that imagine in our mind’s eye of everyone else out there having fun together while we’re stuck on our own. This is, of course, not the case – or at least not the case every time. Yes, some people may be out having fun, but that isn’t going to be everyone all the time. It is a natural part of life that sometimes we end up on our own with no one to go and meet, so we should never feel that it’s a character flaw. It isn’t your fault – and it isn’t forever.
With that out of the way, how do we actually deal with the lonely time? Positive affirmation may be helpful, but it doesn’t help the hours pass by. This is where the situation is different for everyone, but the best recommendation from my perspective is to do the things you love that no one else wants to do. Watch that TV show none of your friends like. Play a single-player game. Go for that walk you can’t convince anyone to go on with you. Make alone time a special time for you and it can become something you cherish rather than dread.