Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Persists! Karen—‘Ministers Gather! At nine o’clock.’ Nine o’clock sharp,” he would add thoughtfully. “If they don’t arrive sharply, there’ll be trouble. They might arrive bluntly. Mummy, what will happen if they don’t arrive sharply?” “Oh, I expect they will.” “But if they don’t ? If they don’t ?” he persisted. “Will the prime minister be very angry? Will he say, ‘You’re bad, bad ministers’? ‘Recession Imminent’! Mummy, what is recession?” Jenifer and I would look at each other helplessly. Jacob would not be fobbed off with anything less than an adequate answer, unless another phrase caught his fancy. “ ‘Moon rises’!” he would shout invariably, as soon as I arrived downstairs to make my breakfast. “Karen—‘Moon rises! Twelve forty-five a.m.’!” “What is he talking about?” I had asked Nanny on my first morning. “It’s in the paper. The time the moon rises each day. It’s the first thing he looks for every morning.” Nanny smiled into the sauce-pan of porridge. “It’s one of his little games. You’ll soon get used to us, Karen.” And so I did. I got used to a house where rose trees grew in the drawing room, where walls were covered in newspaper, and where the day began with a stentorian announcement of moonrise. When I returned from the library in the evening and climbed the stairs to my room, I learned to expect Jacob’s unfailing greeting. “ The Royal—” he would shout from Nanny’s room, where he was watching television. “Arms!” I would yell back as a matter of course, checking in. Soon I felt at home in a house which seemed odd enough to absorb my own strangeness. It was good to have this focus, because Oxford had become a ghost city. Life as a graduate student was very different. True, I had not made many close friends during the last eighteen months, but the crowded, cheerful life of St. Anne’s had given an illusion of sociability. There had always been somebody to have coffee with after dinner, there were tea parties almost every day, and there was usually somebody around in the Junior Common Room. But when the Michaelmas term began in October 1970, Oxford, though crowded with students, seemed deserted. Nearly all my former classmates had scattered to begin new professional lives in publishing, teaching, the civil service, or business. Very few had stayed to do graduate work. The college was now full of a new generation of undergraduates, who were complete strangers. The dons were always reminding us that we were only birds of passage in Oxford. Soon our turn would be over and we would have to leave this artificially constructed existence for the unpredictable, challenging world outside. I never wanted to hear this. I had had my fill of leaving things, places, and people, and longed for some stability. Yet one day, I too would have to face the larger world, which lurked threateningly beyond the groves of academe: unknown, dangerous, and indifferent.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast days. This meant that the noviceship became our whole world. No other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort. The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of noviceship life filled my entire horizon. This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation practiced in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe, and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant males who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But right now I had another three years at Oxford, and perhaps I need never leave the academic world. I seemed to be good at scholarship, and if I did well enough, maybe I could remain in this intellectual haven. I had decided to write my doctoral thesis on Tennyson’s poetic style. Most people thought that this was a good idea, since Tennyson had been much neglected. For decades, students had been taught to dismiss his poetry as sentimental. To deride one of the chief spokesmen of the Victorian era had been a way of exorcising the influence of this crucial but conflicted period. In the 1960s, however, the tide had turned, and scholars started to rediscover the extraordinary beauty and power of some of Tennyson’s verse. I had been drawn to it at once. Writing years before Darwin had published his Origin of Species, Tennyson had been one of the first people to realize the impact that modern biology and geology would have on religion, and his great poem In Memoriam plangently explored the ambiguities of doubt and faith in a way that reflected my own perplexities. But at a deeper level, there was a mood in Tennyson’s poetry that I immediately recognized. So many of his characters seemed walled up in an invincible but menacing solitude, as I was. They too seemed to see the world at one remove, as if from a great distance. Mariana was trapped in her lonely moated grange, where old faces glimmered at the windows and mice shrieked in the wainscot. The Lady of Shalott was imprisoned in a tower, confined there by some unexplained curse, because she could not confront external, objective reality. When she finally did fall in love and ventured into the outside world, it killed her immediately. All this resonated with the hallucinatory visitations that kept me imprisoned in my own inner world. Like so many of Tennyson’s people, I too longed to join in the vibrant life that was going on all around me, but found myself compelled to withdraw by forces that I did not understand. Like me, Tennyson seemed sucked into a horror of his own. When he contemplated the yew tree beside the grave of Arthur Hallam, he imagined the roots of the tree wrapping themselves around the bones and skull of his friend’s body. Mesmerized and (as I so often was) unable to break away from the grotesque vision that he had spun from his own brain, he told the corpse-rooted tree, “I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee.” Still more reminiscent of my own plight were those odd passages from The Princess, where the hero describes the “weird seizures” which periodically descended upon him and drained his surroundings of reality: On a sudden in the midst of men and day, And while I walk’d and talk’d as heretofore, I seemed to move amongst a world of ghosts, And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It’s time to come out.” But this was easier said than done. I was still locked inside my own head, in rather the same way as Charlotte was imprisoned in her bed-sitting-room and Rebecca in her hospital bed. I couldn’t be like Jane, who seemed instinctively to know how to reach out and have a good time. She and Mark would often invite me to join them for a drive and lunch in the country, or she would descend upon me in the library and sweep me off to the pub. Jane knew how things worked and was at home in the world in a way I feared I would never be. And (I was becoming aware) she was obviously going to succeed professionally, and (it seemed increasingly clear) I was not. Jane and I had both sailed through the qualifying examinations for the doctoral program with distinction. But now our paths were dividing. Jane had won a junior research fellowship at St. Anne’s; I had been advised not to apply. My tutors told me repeatedly that I had no future in academia: I should think about traveling, perhaps. I could get a job in a liberal arts college in the United States, a place most of them regarded with ill-concealed disdain. Or I should seriously consider school teaching. That, Dorothy Bednarowska claimed, would be much more my métier. I could not agree. A school, with its bells, rules, and authority figures, was far too like the convent. I wanted to be a scholar. But somehow, it was made clear to me, my face did not fit. This was nothing to do with class, nor was anybody concerned about my mental instability. Nobody took my psychiatric troubles very seriously. Those who knew that I was seeing Dr. Piet simply thought that I was making rather heavy weather about leaving the convent, and would soon come to my senses. Besides, Oxford dons are not the most stable group of people in the world. No, their opposition to my academic career seemed more deeply rooted. “They were really determined to get rid of you,” Jane agreed, years after it had ceased to matter. “They wanted me and they didn’t want you.” But why? My work was considered good. Jane was obviously more “normal” than I, but when had Oxford ever been interested in the norm? There was something about me that my tutors and mentors felt instinctively to be wrong; their recoil was similar, perhaps, to the way a patient will reject a transplanted heart as alien, something that her body cannot assimilate. I doubt they could have put it into words, and now, with hindsight, I think they were right. I was not really suited to the life of a university teacher, nor to the type of scholarship that was currently in vogue at Oxford. I had different talents, but none of us could have known that in 1971, when in some ways I seemed a model student.

• From Wild (2012)

  On my third day out from Sierra City, as I sat hunched near the open door of my tent doctoring my blistered feet, I realized the day before had been the Fourth of July. The fact that I could so clearly imagine what not only my friends but also a good portion of the residents of the United States had done without me made me feel all the more far away. No doubt they’d had parties and parades, acquired sunburns and lit firecrackers, while I was here, alone in the cold. In a flash, I could see myself from far above, a speck on the great mass of green and white, no more or less significant than a single one of the nameless birds in the trees. Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth of December. These mountains didn’t count the days. The next morning I walked through the snow for hours until I came to a clearing where there was a large fallen tree, its trunk bare of both snow and branches. I took my pack off and climbed up on top of it, its bark rough beneath me. I pulled a few strips of beef jerky out of my pack and sat eating it and swigging my water. Soon I saw a streak of red to my right: a fox walking into the clearing, his paws landing soundlessly on top of the snow. He gazed straight ahead without looking at me, not even seeming to know I was there, though that seemed impossible. When the fox was directly in front of me, perhaps ten feet away, he stopped and turned his head and looked peaceably in my direction, his eyes not exactly going to mine as he sniffed. He looked part feline, part canine, his facial features sharp and compact, his body alert. My heart raced, but I sat perfectly still, fighting the urge to scramble to my feet and leap behind the tree for protection. I didn’t know what the fox would do next. I didn’t think he would harm me, but I couldn’t help but fear that he would. He was barely knee-high, though his strength was irrefutable, his beauty dazzling, his superiority to me apparent down to his every pristine hair. He could be on me in a flash. This was his world. He was as certain as the sky. “Fox,” I whispered in the gentlest possible voice I could, as if by naming him I could both defend myself against him and also draw him nearer. He raised his fine-boned red head, but remained standing as he’d been and studied me for several seconds more before turning away without alarm to continue walking across the clearing and into the trees. “Come back,” I called lightly, and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did. And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  Chapter 10: Practicing Praise Joey was having problems in preschool. He wanted to feel connected with the other children, but when he touched and grabbed them during circle time they pulled away. After repeatedly correcting him, his teachers resorted to taking Joey out of the circle, making him feel even more alone. Before I entered private practice as a therapist, one of the positions I held was directing an early intervention program for preschools. When a child was having emotional or behavioral problems at a preschool—being disruptive or not complying with teachers’ directions—we provided a therapist and an early education specialist to come in, observe, and help to solve the problem. What we consistently observed was that the teachers gave the “acting out” children like Joey the most attention when they were acting out. This attention usually took the form of scolding the child or removing him or her from the group. We also confirmed what the teachers already knew: what they were doing wasn’t working. In fact it seemed to be making matters worse. All of us, especially preschoolers, need attention, and if positive attention isn’t available, we’ll settle for—and even seek out—the negative kind. Our primary intervention at these preschools began with helping the teachers identify the behaviors they wanted to see in the children who were acting out. Joey’s teachers said that mostly, they wanted Joey “to keep his hands to himself.” So we encouraged the teachers to begin a new practice. Whenever the teachers noticed Joey with his hands in his lap, or occupied in a way that was not disturbing others, even if it was only for a few seconds, they looked at him and smiled, saying “Joey, good job keeping your

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Only a weekend,” I said. “I know—it’s crazy in a way. But as she says, she’s not the world’s greatest actress, and a new man in a new country seems better than going back to that hand-to-mouth existence in London again. And I think men are much more important to her than any career.” “A nice old-fashioned girl?” Jane smiled sardonically. It was a description that in one way seemed wildly inappropriate, since Lindsey was a sixties girl par excellence and had cast off the restraints of Catholicism with never a backward look. But on the other hand . . . “I think she really is, underneath all the modern trappings. You know: ‘Follow your man.’ ” “Even to Keswick,” Jane capped gloomily. “Well, I’m doing it. But not willingly, I have to tell you. Would you do this? You’ve just left one confining situation; would you give up your new freedom?” I had shrugged. My situation was so different from Jane’s. There was no prospect of my being enslaved to any man; men generally looked through me as though I did not exist. The problem simply did not arise. And yet, I asked myself as I got up to go back to the little room at the Harts’ where I spent the greater part of my life, how free was I? Were not Jane and Lindsey really more adventurous than I was? Would I ever love anything or anybody enough to leave it all behind? I had done that once, when I had entered the convent, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to do it again. That Easter, as usual, I accompanied the Harts to Cornwall. They had an extraordinary house on the south coast, which had been built by Jenifer’s father for her mother as a wedding present. Because of the strong winds, the Cornish usually built behind the cliffs, but Lamledra, as this house was called, stood bravely on the seaward side. It was a massive pile, with a servants’ wing and an amazing baronial-style hall, which had probably been spectacular when Lady Williams had first set up house, but now it had succumbed to Hartlike chaos. From the terrace there was a spectacular view of the Dodman Point and, beyond the red slash of the fuchsia bushes, the startling blue of the Atlantic. In the sloping paddock in front of the house, which curved steeply toward the small beach below, horses from the local riding school grazed peacefully, silhouetted nobly against the sea.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Sister Rebecca had been two years ahead of me. When I had been a postulant, she had been a second-year novice, and we had all seen her as the perfect young nun. She had the serene face of a Botticelli Madonna, her habit was never creased, her eyes were modestly cast down, and she spoke always in a quiet, dispassionate tone, just above a whisper. Most of us forgot how to be nuns from time to time. We would run upstairs, burst into loud laughter, or answer back when reprimanded, but not Sister Rebecca. She was always controlled, composed, and peaceful. When I had arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1967, she was in her final year at St. Anne’s, reading French and Italian, and because we were the only two student nuns in the community, we were thrown much together. Every afternoon we went to the convent chapel together after lunch to perform all our spiritual duties, one after the other, in a soulless marathon of examination of conscience, rosary, spiritual reading, and thirty minutes of mental prayer. The idea was that we should get these “out of the way” so that we could spend the evening studying. When we had finished praying, we took a forty-five-minute walk. And we talked. Although we were not supposed to form friendships, Rebecca and I were so isolated from the other students and from the rest of the community that inevitably a relationship developed. We both loved our work but had nobody else to discuss it with. I would tell her all about Milton, and she would impart to me her latest discoveries about Dante or Proust. But the conversation did not always remain on such an exalted level. I was beginning to rebel. The Oxford community was not an easy one. Most of the nuns there were adamantly opposed to the reforms, about which both Rebecca and I were excited. The evening recreation would often consist of long communal lamentations about the abolition of the old ways, and Rebecca and I would exchange sardonic looks. I discovered that beneath her apparently perfect exterior, Rebecca had quite a sharp tongue and a salty turn of phrase, though she was unfailingly sweet to the older nuns and never showed her irritation, as I so frequently did.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But right now I had another three years at Oxford, and perhaps I need never leave the academic world. I seemed to be good at scholarship, and if I did well enough, maybe I could remain in this intellectual haven. I had decided to write my doctoral thesis on Tennyson’s poetic style. Most people thought that this was a good idea, since Tennyson had been much neglected. For decades, students had been taught to dismiss his poetry as sentimental. To deride one of the chief spokesmen of the Victorian era had been a way of exorcising the influence of this crucial but conflicted period. In the 1960s, however, the tide had turned, and scholars started to rediscover the extraordinary beauty and power of some of Tennyson’s verse. I had been drawn to it at once. Writing years before Darwin had published his Origin of Species, Tennyson had been one of the first people to realize the impact that modern biology and geology would have on religion, and his great poem In Memoriam plangently explored the ambiguities of doubt and faith in a way that reflected my own perplexities. But at a deeper level, there was a mood in Tennyson’s poetry that I immediately recognized. So many of his characters seemed walled up in an invincible but menacing solitude, as I was. They too seemed to see the world at one remove, as if from a great distance. Mariana was trapped in her lonely moated grange, where old faces glimmered at the windows and mice shrieked in the wainscot. The Lady of Shalott was imprisoned in a tower, confined there by some unexplained curse, because she could not confront external, objective reality. When she finally did fall in love and ventured into the outside world, it killed her immediately. All this resonated with the hallucinatory visitations that kept me imprisoned in my own inner world. Like so many of Tennyson’s people, I too longed to join in the vibrant life that was going on all around me, but found myself compelled to withdraw by forces that I did not understand. Like me, Tennyson seemed sucked into a horror of his own. When he contemplated the yew tree beside the grave of Arthur Hallam, he imagined the roots of the tree wrapping themselves around the bones and skull of his friend’s body. Mesmerized and (as I so often was) unable to break away from the grotesque vision that he had spun from his own brain, he told the corpse-rooted tree, “I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was like a spectre - the ghost, I sometimes imagined, of a handsome youth, who had died in that house and still walked its corridors and chambers, searching, searching, for reminders of the life that he had lost there.‘What a scare you gave me, miss!’ the maid might say, hand at her heart, after she had come upon me, lingering at a bend in the stair or in the shadows of some curtain or alcove; but when I smiled and asked what work had she to do there? or, did she know if the day were a fine or a dull one? she would only blush and look frightened: ‘I’m sure, miss, I couldn’t say.’The climax of my day, the event to which my thoughts naturally tended, and which gave direction and meaning to the hours before it, was Diana’s return. There was drama to be had in the choosing of the chamber, and the pose, in which I would arrange myself for her. She might find me smoking in the library, or dozing, with unfastened buttons, in her parlour; I would feign surprise at her entry, or let her rouse me if I pretended sleep. My pleasure at her appearance, however, was real enough. I at once lost that sense of ghostliness, that feeling of waiting in the wing, and grew warm and substantial again before the blaze of her attention. I would light her a cigarette, pour her a drink. If she was weary I would lead her to a chair and stroke her temples; if she was footsore - she wore high black boots, very tightly laced - I would bare her legs and rub the blood back into her toes. If she was amorous - as she frequently was - I would kiss her. She might have me caress her in the library or drawing-room, heedless of the servants who passed beyond the closed door, or who knocked and, at our breathy answering silence, retired unbidden. Or she might send orders that she was not to be disturbed, and lead me to her parlour, to the secret drawer that held the key that unlocked the rosewood trunk.The opening of this still enthralled and excited me, though I had soon grown used to handling its contents. They were, perhaps, mild enough. There was, of course, the dildo that I have described (though the device, or the instrument, was what I learned, following Diana, to call it: I think the unnecessary euphemism, with its particular odour of the surgery or house of correction, appealed to her; only when really heated would she call the thing by its proper name - and even then she was as likely to ask for Monsieur Dildo, or simply Monsieur).

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-month intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory. Visits to the convent parlor were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with “seculars,” so my parents had had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea and making polite conversation, while I went off to eat with the community in the convent refectory. My sister, Lindsey, who was three years younger than I, had hated these visits. As she watched us process into the chapel, genuflecting before the altar with near military precision and kneeling motionless in the pews, the underlying tension, the humorless rigidity, and the fear that somebody might ruin this perfection by making a mistake so petrified her that, to the amusement of some members of the community, she often passed out and had to be carried outside, even though she never fainted anywhere else. My letters were little better. We were never allowed to speak of what happened inside the convent, and since for years I scarcely left the enclosure, I had to confine my remarks to anodyne descriptions of the countryside or reverential accounts of church services. My parents, therefore, had no idea what my life had been like for the last seven years. At a deeper and more worrying level, I found that I simply could not respond to their affection. I shied away from any intimacy, could not bear to be touched or embraced, and could speak to my family only in the rather formal, distant way of nuns. Naturally my parents were hurt; I felt bad about hurting them; and there was an impasse. The training seemed to have worked, after all. My capacity for affection had either atrophied or been so badly damaged that it could not function normally. I felt frozen and could see what people meant when they said that their heart had turned to stone. I could almost feel this new hardness within, like a cold, heavy weight. I had become a person who could not love and who seemed incapable of reaching out to others. Whether I liked it or not, I was now a garden enclosed, a well sealed up.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  The gay boys I met had watched their straight friends engage in the ordinary rites of hooking up, dating, falling in love, falling apart. They would play the role of confidant or “Queer Eye,” or tag along as a fifth wheel, but they rarely got to be the romantic lead. Part of the problem was that their pool of potentials was so small, especially in high school: just as a pair of five-year-olds won’t necessarily be friends simply because they’re the same age, the only two queer boys in the twelfth grade may or may not feel the heat. Few had formal opportunities to meet age-appropriate partners. College communities were somewhat larger, more open, but could feel uncomfortably insular. The mainstream party culture, meanwhile, felt anywhere from unappealing to unsafe. “I did a few weeks of the frat scene and I was like, ‘I’ll be damned if I go back there,’” Zane recalled. “It doesn’t feel right for me, going to a party where it’s a bunch of straight dudes and a bunch of straight girls. It’s very rare to find someone who’s gay. “But that’s okay,” he continued. “The entire city is at my disposal for meeting gentlemen. And that’s where Tinder and Grindr come in.” “A Weight off My Chest” Devon’s new college teammates weren’t saying anything different from what guys say in locker rooms everywhere. “Oh yeah, dude, I’d totally fuck her!” “It didn’t matter what she looked like—the lights were off!” Still, hearing them, his stomach flipped, his mind careening to high school. “Because back then,” he said, “the guys on the team used to say those things about me.” In those days, Devon was still struggling to live as a girl. He’d grown his hair out to shoulder-length from the short crop he’d worn through middle school (when he was considered a “tomboy”) and had asked his mom to buy him more body-conscious, feminine clothes, embarrassing as they were to wear. He tried to join in female friends’ gossip, agreeing that a boy they liked was cute, or claiming himself to have a crush on someone. He even tried kissing a guy once, though it didn’t go well. “But it was a valiant effort,” he recalled, laughing. Devon was also a competitive swimmer, a good one, at a local club. His younger brother was on the boys’ team for a while; he hated being in the locker room because of how the other guys talked about his sister. “I had large boobs and I was also skinny, so I was the object of a lot of that misogyny you see in athletic culture,” Devon said. “Some of them said things right to my face, talking about my boobs or saying they wanted to eat me out, stuff like that. And I was like, ‘I hate all of you.’”

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  And you’d think that with so many people feeling isolated, like Maddy and Nora, everyone would be talking about it. But no one does. There’s a stigma to admitting you have no friends. Or that you’re lonely. To make matters worse, if you look for advice on how to make friends, like Maddy, you usually end up with a list of places to meet people. But that’s not what you’re looking for. “Meeting people” is really different from “making friends.” One is an event; the other is a process. When Maddy searches for “how to make friends,” the answer she’s looking for is not “volunteer at an animal shelter.” She’s looking for the answer to, “What do I do once we’ve shaken hands and exchanged names? Now what?” * * * Maddy and Nora, respectively, have two problems common in social anxiety: either we feel like we don’t know anyone or we know enough people but don’t feel close to them. Either way, we often think, “What’s wrong with me?” Nothing’s wrong with you, but social anxiety magically confers filters that are getting in your way. Sometimes it’s our presumptions: we unconsciously create too stringent a filter and rule out too many people. It might be demographic: Oh, she’s married/single—that’s not going to work. It might be perception: Oh, she’s so busy—that’s not going to work, or, She probably has a lot of friends already—that’s not going to work. Or we might just have a low tolerance for ambiguity: if she’s not 100 percent unambiguously welcoming, we rule her out—that’s not going to work. Sometimes it’s our expectations. Remember the perfectionism chapter? Those of us prone to social anxiety tend to look for an instant, capital-F Friend. Without even realizing it, we’re looking for a ready-made BFF with whom we feel connected right away. We wish we could walk into an event and walk out arm in arm with a new buddy (or two!). But on this planet, that rarely happens. Social anxiety tells us we should find friends instantly. The semantics are subtle, but telling. Social anxiety tells us to find a friend—to win someone over right away—but real friends must be made. Friendship is a process, not a ready-made discovery. But that’s actually good news. Rather than searching for a diamond in the rough, it turns out the rough contains scores of potential friends. The raw stuff, the stardust that transforms into friends, is everywhere. Almost everyone is a candidate. Oddly, to make a friend, you don’t need the “right” person. Instead, the person becomes right over time. So how does this work? If friends aren’t found, hunter-gatherer-style, but instead are cultivated, like advanced agriculture, how do we do this? Here’s where to start: Is someone friendly to you? Great, they’re in. This is the only bar. You’re not friends yet, but you’re friendly with each other. Some of your friend candidates will stay at this level, but three things will move others toward friendship. REPETITION

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  The only note of caution is that disclosure is different from confession. In the thirty-six questions paper, the researchers define disclosure as “escalating and reciprocal,” meaning that telling someone about yourself should be a gradual give-and-take. Once, at a bridal shower, I met a friend of the bride. I introduced myself, shook her hand, and before I said another word she told me she was pregnant through a sperm donor and that to prepare for the birth her doula had told her to soak a thong in vitamin E oil and hike it up to her perineum so she wouldn’t tear. I wasn’t sure what to say to her for the rest of the shower—I kept squirming at the mental image of her oily wedgie. I’m no prude, but as a first conversation her revelations were a tad overwhelming. More seriously, I once had a client who would disclose in her first conversations that she had been abused as a child and had twice been raped. It was too heavy, too fast, and she was crushed when people steered clear afterwards. She thought she was speaking her truth, but as we collaboratively decided, other people couldn’t handle her full truth right away. There were other truths that made up who she was and she could share those first, saving the deeper truths for later. As for Maddy, she realized book clubs might be easier if she gave people more to work with besides, “Hi, I’m Maddy.” At the first meeting, she told me, after she introduced herself in the opening go-around she had remained silent and looked largely at the floor, equally hoping that someone would talk to her and that everyone would leave her alone. Turns out a woman had approached her afterwards to see how she liked the group. Maddy had said, “It was great, thanks,” with a smile but left it at that. The woman took Maddy’s cue and said, “Great, hope you’ll join us again,” and then moved on. Social anxiety makes us masters of ending conversations. It’s easy: a certain tone of finality, saying hi but not stopping to chat, or simply not saying anything more sends the message that we don’t want to talk. Ending conversation is another safety behavior—we’re trying to save ourselves from the anxiety. But we trade the anxiety of the moment for loneliness in the long run.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  College campuses are not immune from those biases. Y. Joel Wong, a professor of counseling at Indiana University, found that both male and female students routinely ranked Asian American men as less physically attractive, less athletic, less aggressive, and less sexual than others. In interviewing a racially diverse group of female students about hookup culture, Nicole Chen, a senior at the University of Michigan, found that while the women held no particular sexual stereotypes for white men, they believed (whether or not they had personal experience) that African American men were more sexually dominant with larger penises than others and Asian Americans—whether of Southeast Asian, East Asian, or South Asian descent—had “small dicks” and were “worse in bed.” Putting aside, for a moment, whether one’s appeal as a casual partner ought to be the measure of sexual success, or whether penis size has any relationship to women’s sexual satisfaction, it’s clear that African American and Asian American men are flip sides of the same racialized, gendered coin, with white men controlling the toss (heads you lose, tails I win): one group made hypersexual, the other hyposexual; one threatening for its supposed intellectual inferiority, the other for its alleged superiority. As Wong told me, “Masculine norms don’t exist in a vacuum. They reflect the dominant culture, and that is who they are designed to benefit. Men of color are treated based on stereotypes relating to white, heterosexual masculinity: the term to describe it is ‘gendered racism.’” Latinx guys, too, talked about the impact of diverging or conforming to dominant ideals. Mauricio, eighteen, whose parents were immigrants from Ecuador, told me he felt perpetually “disconnected” at the largely white high school he attended. “I don’t fit the mold here,” he said. “I’m not white, tall, posh, or fit. So I’ve never hooked up with anyone.” The problem, he added, was not “my last name per se,” but his comparative height, weight, and skin color. “There’s a guy on campus who’s Hispanic but if you met him on the street you’d think he was white,” Mauricio said. “And he’s very much engaged in hookup culture. Latino men who look like me? It’s much harder. There have definitely been times where you just feel unwanted, and you start to think, What if the whole world is like this? What if no one will ever like me? It feels really . . . lonely at times.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This has been a pattern in my life. Once I had started to study seriously at Oxford, I found that I could no longer conform to convent life. The attitudes that you learn at your desk spill over into your everyday existence. The silence in which I live has also opened my ears and eyes to the suffering of the world. In silence, you begin to hear the note of pain that informs so much of the anger and posturing that pervade social and political life. Solitude is also a teacher. It is lonely; living without intimacy and affection tears holes in you. Saint Augustine of Hippo said somewhere that yearning makes the heart deep. It also makes you vulnerable. Silence and solitude strip away a skin; they break down that protective shell of heartlessness which we cultivate in order to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world that presses in upon us on all sides. This is not always comfortable; in fact, it has become something of a social liability, because I find myself more and more distressed by the disdain that so often peppers social conversation. I know how this puts a splinter of ice into the heart of the disdained. I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant. Of course, toleration has its limits. We should cry out against injustice and cruelty wherever we find it, as the prophets did, especially when it occurs in our own society or on “our” side. It may be politically expedient to ignore the beam in our own eye while decrying the splinter in the eye of our enemy, but I do not see how it can be a religious option. But this pain is a small price to pay for the spirituality of empathy. Paradoxically, what I have gained from this identification with suffering is joy. This was something that I did not expect. And this habit of looking outside myself into the heart of another has put me outside the prism of myself. This ecstasy may not last for long, but while it lasts I experience an astonishing freedom. Self, after all, is our basic problem. When I wake up at three in the morning and ask myself, Why does this have to happen to me? Why cannot I have what X has? Why am I so unloved and unappreciated?—and I still have plenty of moments like this—I learn that ego is at the heart of all pain. When I get beyond this for a few moments, I feel enlarged and enhanced—just as the Buddha promised.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Reap the benefits of intimacyThe most beautiful part of being in a relationship is knowing that you are not alone—that no matter what else happens in the world, you have someone to count on to make you laugh, wipe away your tears, and pick you up when you are down. You and your partner can take turns at being the support system—when you have health or family concerns, you know you have someone to worry with you and to offer practical help. Take turns caring for each other, whatever happens. Loving ritualsSexual and emotional routines are a simple way to create intimacy in your relationship. Nonsexual rituals such as Tuesday-night tacos, Friday-night movies, or breakfast in bed on Sunday can help to create intimate bonds between you. You should both look forward to these rituals, and enjoy them. You can also create sexual rituals—you may already have a few, such as cuddling after orgasm. [image file=image_rsrc3AT.jpg] Sex files: Rebuilding sex and intimacyBeing intimate with your lover is more than just having sex; it is the way you communicate physically. This couple’s problems stemmed from lack of intimacy. Their story shows how important it is to continue to treat each other as desirable, even when you don’t have time for regular lovemaking. [image file=image_rsrc3AU.jpg] Background Morgan, 45, and Derek, 47, have been married for 10 years. They have three children: six-year-old twin girls, Lacey and Brooke, and an eight-year-old son, Max. The problem Morgan and Derek came to see me after Derek had a near brush with infidelity. Morgan had discovered some private emails that Derek had been sending to a colleague. Although not overtly sexual in nature, the emails contained enough affection and emotional intimacy to make Morgan concerned. In the emails, Derek had also written about problems in his marriage, which made Morgan feel betrayed and alarmed, since he’d never mentioned any problems to her. In addition, they hadn’t had sex in months, and cuddling, kissing, and affection had all but disappeared. In my personal session with Morgan, I asked her if there had been any clues beyond a nonexistent sex life that might suggest Derek wasn’t happy. “I don’t know,” she replied, “I’ve got three kids at home. The girls have been ill, and before that Max was having problems at school. I have a part-time job too.” It became clear that Morgan and Derek didn’t spend any time together without the kids. “We’re supposed to do a date night once a week, but it never happens. Something always comes up.” When I spoke to Morgan about the emails to his colleague he explained that he liked feeling attractive and wanted. “At home Morgan ignores me and talks to the kids, or she talks to me about the kids. Or she gives me chores and then nags me about them.”

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Also be aware that open relationships can be particularly difficult and unsatisfying for women. When women achieve an orgasm, the brain releases oxytocin, otherwise known as the chemical of attachment. Men have higher levels of testosterone in their brains, which may help to counteract this chemical. So protect yourself from becoming too comfortable with a partner who might not share your feelings: set limitations, and guard your emotions and your health. [image file=image_rsrc3AM.jpg] Casual encountersThese types of attachments can be temporarily fulfilling. They are often based upon sexual gratification—think one-night stands. Where do casual encounters stand in an average woman’s life? Most will have explored the one-night stand at least once, and it can be tempting on a lonely night. With the right precautions, casual encounters can be a satisfying part of a woman’s sexual journey. Take advantage of the temporary situation by being as wild and kinky as you desire. After all, it’s just for one night, so you don’t need to hold back or feel embarrassed. Try out a new position and get in touch with your femme fatale. Casual encounters might not be the place to find love, but they can help you hone your sexual prowess. [image file=image_rsrc3AN.jpg] May–December relationshipsA significant age difference between partners has the tendency to set some people’s heads spinning, including family members and close friends. It can also be tricky for the couple in question. With this sort of relationship, you must be prepared to confront differing age issues. Perhaps one of you has children who have hit their rocky adolescent years, or maybe he is nearing retirement while you are just getting into the swing of your career. Different stages of life also present different energy levels and health concerns. While it is true that May–December couples learn a lot from each other, they also encounter unique concerns about aging. Age might not be an immediate issue, but will you still feel the same way when you are 60 and he is 45, or 70 and 55? How will you handle illness and aging? Another major issue is children—whether you have them already, or one of you wants them and the other doesn’t. Manage these difficulties by remembering that the relationship is not necessarily about whether you are compatible parents or whether children are in your future—shared life goals, an enjoyment of each other’s sense of humor, similar interests, affection, and open communication are the basis of good relationships. If his stance on children is a deal breaker, don’t force or trick him into adopting your point of view. Make a clean break and find someone who shares your dreams for the future.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I didn’t like him much. Janet, however, who called oftener, I took to at once. She was eighteen or nineteen, big-boned and handsome; a born barmaid I had thought her when studying her photograph - so I was rather tickled to learn that she worked as a tapstress in a City public-house, lodging with the family who ran it, in their rooms above the bar. Florence fretted over her like anything: their mother had died while the sisters were still quite young (their father had died many years before that), Florence had had all the raising of the girl to do herself and, like older sisters everywhere, was sure that Janet would be led astray by the first young man who got his hands on her. ‘She will marry without giving it a second’s thought,’ she said wearily to me, when Janet paid her first visit after I moved in. ‘She’ll be dragged down having babies all her life, and her good looks will be spoiled, and she’ll die worn out at forty-three, like our own mother did.’ When Janet came for supper, she stayed the night; then she would sleep up in Florence’s bed, and I’d hear their murmurs and their laughter as I lay in the parlour below - the sound made me terribly restless. But Janet herself seemed marvellously unsurprised to see me dishing up the herrings at the breakfast-table, or putting her brother’s linen, on a wash-day, through the mangle. ‘All right. Nancy,’ she would say - she called me ‘Nancy’ from the start. The first time we met I still had the bruise at my eye, and when she saw it, she whistled. She said, ‘I bet it was a girl done that - wasn’t it? A girl always goes for the eyes every time. A bloke goes for the teeth.’When the house wasn’t being shivered to its foundations by the thud of Janet’s footsteps on the stairs, it was trembling to the arguments and the laughter of Florence’s girl-friends, who came by regularly to bring books and pamphlets and bits of gossip, and to take tea. I thought them a very quaint breed, these girls.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But I couldn’t afford these machines—almost two hundred dollars’ worth of sexual hardware—and it seemed pathetic and undignified for me to have them in storage in my life when I would never be able to use them with someone like Joyce. Sipping wine, with the radio playing some progressive jazz construct with the usual cleanly miked bongos and synthesized tribal flutes and pre-enjoyed Steely Dan chords, I filled out the return slip, wrote, Nobody to use these with, unfortunately , next to the REASON FOR RETURN line, and one by one I tucked them back in the carton they came in (they had been responsibly packed in recycled styrene), my self-pity mounting to impossible heights. I wanted … I wanted to tell Joyce my dream of a flying blue brassiere: that we would be stranded in a rowboat in the middle of a sulfur lake, and the only way we could escape is if she took off her shirt and removed her flying blue brassiere and kneeled in its cups and took strong hold of the straps and pulled up on them for lift, using them as a steering-bridle. I would ride piggyback, and she, noble bare-breasted horsewoman of Lycra, would lift us and swoosh us to verdant safety. I also wanted to tell her the dream I had many mornings just before I woke up, that my mouth was filled with an enormous wad of decayed Bazooka chewing gum: I had stuffed in eight or nine loaves of gum because the first taste was so attention-gettingly tart, but now it was changed for the worse—sticky and oppressive, almost doughy, almost friable, and I tried to hook its unpleasant mass out of my mouth with my finger and couldn’t remove it, but on waking I discovered that the gum-mass was in reality just my tongue, which as I moved up toward consciousness had made its sluggish presence known against the reviving nerves of the roof of my mouth. I wanted to tell Joyce these dreams. But she wasn’t my lover, and lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams. I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there.