Definition Essay: What Is Loneliness?

What is loneliness? With a world population of approximately seven billion, it is hard to imagine that anyone can feel alone. Physically, it is almost impossible to be left alone. During pregnancy, a baby spends nine months with its mother in the womb. Once born, you are constantly spending time around others and unlikely to fail at making at least one connection with another being. To be alone emotionally however is another matter. In the confines of the mind we tend to fall victim to our own psyche and as a result suffer from loneliness.
Loneliness is breakfast, lunch and dinner in solitude when I do not want it to be. It is chilling at home at five pm on a Friday night-- every night. It is an address book full of contacts but few actually contacted. It is half written texts and unsent drafts that end up deleted. It is waiting for others to reach out to me when I could be reaching out to them myself. …show more content…
It is the five year old me yelling and crying for someone to find me and let me out of the locked bathroom, house or van. Trapped behind a door for what felt like hours I felt loneliness and fear creeping in. Every situation was the result of an adult closing the door in my face, with me being too small to properly handle the door knobs and too weak to wrench the van door open. Loneliness is a sentence repeated five times before I give up because I speak in too low a voice and no one heard me the first time, or the following four for that matter. It is when you ask me “What’s up?” or “How are you?” and I clam up, taking ten minutes to respond, not knowing what to say except “Not much, you?” and “ I am fine,”. I learned to become a better listener than speaker because I want others to rely on me even though I am reluctant to rely on