Archive for the ‘Stigma of Loneliness’ Category
Buying Lonely at a bookstore
I had to run out and buy a copy of Lonely recently at a big-box bookstore in town. This was a slightly odd experience for me. When you publish a book, your publisher sends “author copies,” so there hadn’t previously been any need for me to go to a bookstore and buy a copy of my own book.
With my author copies running low, however, I decided to venture out and buy myself a copy of Lonely. The first challenge was finding it. It was shelved–for reasons known only to Chapters–alongside diet and cookbooks. Having found the book, I had to pay for it, and this was where the real fun began.
I was the only person at the checkout, and the clerk looked at the book, and then at me, and then said, “Isn’t that a nice cover!” Now, the cover is nice–I love the birds on a wire–but it wasn’t anything to get too excited about. It was pretty clear that the clerk was a bit unnerved at being handed a book called LONELY, and felt the need to hide her discomfort by making small talk. I toyed with the notion of saying, “I wrote it,” but figured the clerk would lose it completely. As it was, I agreed that the cover was nice, and then paid, happy to have wandered into a small, impromtu field experiment on loneliness and stigma.
My strong sense is that, if the book had been about puppies, or gardening, or booze, the clerk wouldn’t have felt the need to paper over the transaction. It was sort of fun seeing her feel the need to say something about the book. It was also interesting to me to realize I had no problems buying a book called Lonely. Granted, I wrote the book, but I was miles ahead of where I used to be, when signing out books with “Loneliness” on the cover made me feel self-conscious and embarrassed. This time around, I was the one who felt calm, and the clerk was a little freaked out.
Being “outed” as lonely
Was at a large meeting with my boss this week (yes, I have a day job), and we were doing introductions around the table, and my boss was introducing me and she said, “Emily just wrote a book on….” Silence. I could see my boss panicking slightly, not knowing if it was OK to “out” me as lonely. Apparently not, since she settled on “social isolation.”
I found this interesting. It was a lot like watching someone try to figure out whether to out someone as gay. I wouldn’t have minded if my boss had said, “Emily just wrote a book on loneliness,” but Susan was clearly unsure about what to say. So she equivocated, to protect me. I found this sweet, but unnecessary. It hints at how much stigma attaches to loneliness. After all, I just put my name and photo on a book called LONELY, but people are still uncomfortable describing me this way. My sense is that they feel they’d be saying something damaging about me if they used the word, as though knowledge of my loneliness might hurt me in the workplace. I don’t think it will, but others are clearly not convinced. We have a long way to go, people.
New resolution re strangers diagnosing me online
I just had a smart reader of this blog write in and say, “Ignore them! They’re all nuts!” And I think I have to agree. One person told me (again, an anonymous Internet poster) that I’d have my life-long loneliness conquered if I just spent more time reading the cartoon page of the newspaper. This was actually wacky enough to put a smile on my face.
So, while I will definitely and always read notes sent to me by the readers of the blog and the book, I will–officially–no longer read anonymous posts on the Internet.
Stigma — I’ve been “diagnosed”
I knew this would happen: someone online (not a reader of my book, or the blog), has diagnosed me as having Avoidant Personality Disorder. I dissect “AvPD” pretty neatly in the book. My sense is that the “Avoidant” label is being used precisely because we don’t talk about loneliness.
A personality disorder refers to something inherently wrong with the self. There is nothing at all wrong with loneliness: it is not a mark of a malfunctioning personality.
What ticks me off (ooh, I’m getting mad here!) is that I say “lonely,” and someone immediately says, “Oh, you’re not lonely, you’re avoidant.” Actually, the problem is loneliness. If there were less stigma attaching to the state, we might be able to start talking about it without having to slap labels like “AvPD” on it.
“Anonymous” comments
Many thanks to the people who have written in response to some of my blog posts. I love reading what people have to say, and I’ve seen some really good ideas put forward.
One thing I have done, however, is pull people’s names off of the comments. This is because (a) loneliness is a stigmatized state, and (b) I’m not sure that people want their names published.
If you’re OK with having your name attached to your post, just indicate that in your message, and I’ll share your name or “handle” with the world!
Breaking the taboo against loneliness
My first Canadian review has appeared, in the magazine Quill and Quire, and it uses the word “bravery.” The word comes up a lot in relation to LONELY. Every time I hear it, I think, “They really mean crazy“–as in, “That’s a really crazy thing you’ve done, writing about loneliness.”
Now that media is beginning to kick in, and I’m being “outed” as lonely, I can feel stigma doing its work. I’ll read a review, or see a mention of my book on a blog, and think, “Oh, no. What am I doing?” Writing about loneliness in private is one thing. Talking to a journalist about it for a nation-wide magazine is another.
Years ago, when I first started this project, my agent told me I needed a mission statement. She told me to write one sentence about why I was writing my book, and to tape the sentence to the front of my laptop, so that I’d see it every day. I didn’t tape my statement to my laptop (I like things to be clean), but I did write it down, and I still have it crammed into the pen jar on my desk.
My mission statement was, “I want lonely people to feel less alone.” That was why I wrote the book. And that’s got to be the sentiment that gets me through interviews, and through the admission — out loud this time — that I struggle with loneliness.
The stigma of loneliness and solitude
We live in a culture that prizes sociability. Remember that story that came out a few years ago, about Paris Hilton having 500 names in her cell phone? That’s the ideal; that’s the sort of social circle we’re all “supposed” to have.
If you don’t have a social circle like Paris Hilton’s—if you’re socially isolated, or lonely, or dealing with a solitude you can’t work your way out of—odds are you’ll feel embarassed about your state. You won’t want anyone to know about it. You might try to hide your feelings of loneliness, or the extent of your solitude: you might lie, or make up references to social events that never took place, or just not talk to anyone about how meagre your life has become.
This sort of reaction is normal. It’s hard, when you’re surrounded by messages suggesting that sociability is easy to achieve, to feel as though you’re doing something really, really wrong if you don’t have a big social circle. You’re not doing anything wrong. As I discuss in LONELY, it’s the culture that’s out of whack, not the person who feels isolated.
What’s a stigma?
To be sort of academic about it, a stigma is a trait or attribute that is judged so negatively that it “engulfs” a personality. To take a counter-example: You might be unco-ordinated. You might not be good at sports, and you might occasionally drop or break things. But lack of co-ordination isn’t stigmatized in our society. No one thinks that, because you’re unco-ordinated, you’re ugly, or dumb, or unfriendly.
It’s stigmatized traits that spill outwards to overtake an entire personality. If you possess a trait that’s stigmatized, people will see that you’re (to use a common example) disabled, and then think that you also lack a sense of humour, might not be too bright, might not be friendly, etc. (And of course none of these things are true!)
Feelings of loneliness and solitude are stigmatized in the sense that—if we know that someone is lonely—we assume things about them. We think that the lonely are unattractive, clingy, unintelligent, passive, unsuccessful, and insincere. The fact that individual lonely people don’t exhibit these traits doesn’t matter, because the stigma is doing all the work: it’s making lonely people seem a certain way, regardless of how they are actually behaving.
Is it normal to not want to tell people about my loneliness or solitude?
Yes, it is 100% normal to feel as though you have to “hide” your loneliness. That’s what a stigma does: it leaves you convinced you have to hide the trait in question, in order to avoid negative judgments.
Virtually everyone hides loneliness, for fear of negative evaluations. Pyschologists and sociologists know that loneliness is a largely hidden phenomenon; individual lonely people I interviewed in LONELY all admitted to hiding the state.
Feeling the need to hide your loneliness is part of the experience of loneliness, in much the same way that shame about depression was part of the depressive experience just thirty years ago. Loneliness and unbroken solitude are characterized not just by crushing feelings of isolation, but by embarrassment about those very feelings. Lonely people feel not just lonely, but as though there’s something wrong with them for feeling that way at all.
Is the stigma about lonely people true? Is there something really wrong with loneliness?
No, the stigma about loneliness is not true. There have been lots of “stigma” studies carried out, specifically to test stereotypical notions, and they’ve all shown that the lonely are just as good-looking, just as friendly, and just as smart as everyone else.
The thing to understand about stigmas is that they operate despite evidence to the contrary. That’s what makes them so powerful—the ideas attaching to the stigma are stronger than the behaviours a stigmatized person might actually display.
In the case of loneliness and solitude, the stigma is very pronounced, and this is the case despite the fact that those struggling with loneliness and solitude really don’t differ from the nonlonely in any discernable ways.