How Can I Make My Loneliness Go Away?

It is Saturday night. The boy sits alone in his room.
“I hate weekends!” he shouts. But there is no one in the room to answer. He picks up a magazine and sees a picture of a group of young people at the beach. He hurls the magazine against the wall. Tears well up. He clamps his teeth on his underlip, but the tears keep pushing. Unable to fight it any longer, he falls on his bed, sobbing, “Why am I always left out?”
DO YOU sometimes feel like that—cut off from the world, lonely, useless, and empty? If so, do not despair. For while feeling lonely is no fun, it is not some fatal disease. Simply put, loneliness is a warning signal. Hunger warns you that you need food. Loneliness warns you that you need companionship, closeness, intimacy. We need food to function well. Likewise, we need companionship to feel well.
Have you ever watched a bed of glowing coals? When you take one coal away from the heap, the glow of that single coal dies away. But after you put the coal back into the heap, it glows again! In isolation, we humans similarly do not “glow,” or function well, for long. The need for companionship is built into our makeup.
Alone But Not Lonely
Essayist Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Do you agree? “Yes,” says Bill, age 20. “I like nature. Sometimes I get in my little boat and go out on a lake. I sit there for hours all alone. It gives me time to reflect on what I’m doing with my life. It’s really great.” Twenty-one-year-old Steven agrees. “I live in a big apartment building,” he says, “and sometimes I go to the roof of the building just to be alone. I get some thinking done and pray. It’s refreshing.”
Yes, if used well, moments of solitude can give us deep satisfaction. Jesus too enjoyed such moments: “Early in the morning, while it was still dark, [Jesus] rose up and went outside and left for a lonely place, and there he began praying.” (Mark 1:35) Remember, Jehovah did not say, ‘It is not good for man to be momentarily by himself.’ Rather, God said that it was not good for man “to continue by himself.” (Genesis 2:18-23) It is prolonged periods of isolation, then, that may lead to loneliness. The Bible warns: “One isolating himself will seek his own selfish longing; against all practical wisdom he will break forth.”—Proverbs 18:1.
Temporary Loneliness
Sometimes loneliness is imposed on us by circumstances beyond our control, like being away from close friends as a result of moving to a new location. Recalls Steven: “Back home James and I were friends, closer than brothers. When I moved away, I knew I was going to miss him.” Steven pauses, as if reliving the moment of departure. “When I had to board the plane, I got choked up. We hugged, and I left. I felt that something precious was gone.”
How did Steven make out in his new environment? “It was rough,” he says. “Back home my friends liked me, but here some of the folks I worked with made me feel as if I were no good. I remember looking at the clock and counting back four hours (that was the time difference) and thinking what James and I could be doing right now. I felt lonely.”