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How to Make a Lonely Place a Home
For some people, home is a constant, a building they’ve lived in for many years or a neighborhood whose back passages they know by heart. For others, home may be more of an idea they carry with them from house to house, town to town, perhaps even country to country.
Either way, it can feel lonely at times.
Even when your family lives close by, your barista knows your name, and long-time friends are regular dinner companions, we can still feel like we’re on our own. Maybe those dinners with friends are most often a circle of couples, around whom you feel like the dowdy tagalong. Or the physical closeness of family doesn’t translate to the emotional one you want. Or the romance you once thought radiated from the life of a rolling stone is more often a gnawing loneliness that reliably finds you come nightfall.
We rarely suspect others can be as lonely as we; they have full lives with large rosters of friends and social engagements. But even the most flirtatious social butterfly with the most intricate social tapestry knows what it’s like to feel isolated, stagnant, and left out.
Whether you’re trying to start over somewhere new or you’ve hit a wall where you are, I find we can make a lonely place feel like home by creating our own sense of belonging, rather than waiting for it to find us. Here’s how:
Internal belonging: Remember you are not your surroundings
It’s easy to forget. We have a tendency to mirror what we see around us, from the fashion to the lingo to the way we step on and off the metro. When we don’t feel at ease in our surroundings — be they new or long-standing — we can be quick to assume it’s our fault.
We are not like the others here; therefore, we are strange. We haven’t made any new friends recently or found a committed partner, so we must be intolerable. We don’t have any plans for the weekend; we do not have a place here.
But the truth is, we can have a place everywhere. We just have to make it for ourselves. In my Learnings from Five Years Living in a Different Country, I wrote about how living abroad, at first, made me question who I am, subconsciously altering my speaking voice, posture, and manner of dress. Eventually, I realized the person responsible for my awkwardness, my self-doubt, and my hesitance wasn’t the strangeness of my surroundings or the perceived aloofness of my peers; it was me. I had forgotten that I get to decide who I am and how I want to be and whether or not I feel like I belong — and that none of those things are dependent on my physical surroundings.
If you’re feeling lonely where you are now, remember that you need neither acceptance nor a savior to validate your identity and buoy your spirits. You can do that for yourself, for if you once had the power to be lively and bouncy and energetic, then that power is still within you, no matter where you are.
Social belonging: Invite people over
Of course, the fastest way to not feel lonely is to put yourself around other people. Sure, there is that old terror of feeling lonely in a crowded room, but when the room is your own and the guests are chosen by you, the odds of that terror taking shape drastically dwindle.
And it needn’t be a big party to merit an invitation. Why not invite an acquaintance over for tea? Or a few friends for a Sunday brunch? If cooking isn’t your strong suit, how about a potluck? Or simply wine and cheese?
It feels quite daunting, these days, to invite others into our homes. (In fact, The New York Times claimed the party died over 10 years ago.) And, yes, it can take a little courage to put yourself out there, reach out first, and initiate plans. That’s why I believe it takes a bit of a loner spirit to make new friends; when you’re confident and comfortable in your own company, it’s easier to make the first move and be the one who proposes new ideas.
My husband and I frequently host dinners and soirées, once even an extravagant, multi-course Easter brunch (with my husband’s culinary skills, not mine). These conversations around the table, on the floor, and away in far-off corners when two people really hit it off, are what have made our small apartments and used furniture feel like a banquet hall and what have turned light acquaintanceships into years-long friendships. They’re what have made what could have been lonely cities our homes.
Physical belonging: Prioritize beauty, whatever that means for you
In these tiny apartments, fraught with used furniture, leaky pipes, cheap IKEA wares, and even the occasional mouse, I stave off the listlessness, melancholy, and loneliness that hit us all at one point or another by making beauty a priority.
For me, that looks like postcards, paintings, and guitars scattered on the walls, mismatched teacups, an overflowing bookshelf, and dried flowers that stay with me even when the living have lost the good fight. For you, that may look like a wall of CDs, a painting drying on an easel, or a shelf alive with houseplants. Though we are not our surroundings, I would be remiss to say our living quarters don’t influence our mood. By letting our personalities leave a tangible mark, we can stake claim to what feels like an unwelcome, damp place and assert with color, texture, and shine: “I belong here.”
If you’re struggling with an uncooperative housemate, a difficult family member, or an otherwise less-than-ideal living situation that’s got you feeling powerless and alone, consider what corners you can reclaim for yourself, however you wish.
Your home is wherever you feel like yourself
I believe we feel the most lonely, not when we’re without friends, but when we’re without ourselves. That is, when we don’t have the internal peace and confidence to enjoy our own company.
When we don’t feel comfortable doing things alone, every place feels like a lonely place. But when we remind ourselves that we can belong anywhere, we are always capable of forming new relationships, and we have the right to live beautifully, we can stop waiting to be happy and start feeling at home, no matter where we go.
Read how to get through a difficult time for more ideas on how to find agency in your own life. These poems about new beginnings give a more artful take.
From guest writers, Isabel Ravenna shares her perspective on why living alone doesn’t have to be lonely, and Gavin Williams tells his story about moving to a new city in his thirties and feeling lonely in his “prime.”
Hello, I’m Merry.
I’m an American-raised, Paris-based writer. By day, I work as a technical ghostwriter. Here, I get to write about whatever I want. I call it “A Merry Loner” because I believe that once you can be happy on your own, you can do anything.
I send an email whenever I publish something new. That’s all.
If you think someone would like this post, you can send it to them. (It would honestly mean a lot to me.)
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How to Stop Waiting to Be Happy
I love playing the long game. It’s kind of my thing. And it’s generally really worked out for me.
I didn’t go to the liberal arts college of my dreams because I didn’t want to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, which meant years later, I could quit my desk job, emotionally recharge with a yearlong stint as a barista, and then pick up and move to France to pursue a more creative life because I didn’t have rude debt repayments tapping me on the shoulder every month.
But sometimes, I play the long game too hard, always working for what’s to come and how great things will be when I get there instead of focusing on where I am now.
Yes, I have my moments of being present. On a recent train trip home to Paris, for example, I marveled at the luxury of enjoying a cappuccino while reading in a near-empty restaurant car with a green landscape whizzing past me. But these moments, I admit, can be rather fleeting. Then I’m back to making my to-do lists, thinking about what lies ahead in the next weeks, or just daydreaming about where I’ll be a year from now, even though I spent all this effort to get where I am right now.
I am Sisyphus and, at once, Zeus, creating my own boulders to push up the hill.
Living like this does have its advantages. I credit my meager repertoire of academic and professional accomplishments to long-term thinking and planning ahead. But it’s not always fun. And it’s possibly holding me back in other ways I don’t always realize, like thinking happiness is something I have to work towards and achieve instead of letting myself feel right now.
I’m working on it, though. Like this:
Making time to do the things I want to do now, not later
I’ve been working as a professional writer for the last 10 years. I’ve wanted to write a blog for the last 10 years, too. I didn’t. I was always too busy, or I didn’t have the right ideas, or I was too nervous to put myself out there.
I didn’t start this blog until two years ago; and it was not joyful. As always, I was thinking too far ahead, about anything but writing, really. I wanted an intricate website, a roster of guest writers I commissioned, and an elaborate social media presence. I had turned an interest into a task, and (unsurprisingly) it sucked all the fun out of it.
So in the last few months, I’ve forced myself to stop thinking ahead. I deleted all of A Merry Loner’s social media accounts (there are too many interesting things to do instead of social media, anyway), stripped the website to bare bones, and made myself sit down to write with just a pen, notebook, and what’s going on in my head. Rather than making writing another task that needs to fight for priority on my to-do list, I just started making time for it because I want to.
And who could have predicted that doing things you enjoy makes the days better?
Stopping the search for “it”
You know what “it” is. We all have an “it” (perhaps several), those covetable, cure-all will o’ the wisps that we’re sure would soothe all our ailments (both of the heart and of the mind) if we could just make them ours.
More money, so we’ll have no worries and all the trinkets we desire. More time, to pursue all of our passions. More friends, so we are never lonely. More romance, so we feel unique and cherished. More beauty, so people treat us better and the mirror is an admirer, not an enemy.
These are just some of the bigger and more obvious “its,” but the smaller and more specific can be just as consuming. Even silly, everyday objects (like a new pair of shoes or a perfect notebook) can take on a fateful sense of power. With these shoes, we will look more sophisticated. With that notebook, we will be brilliant.
But the search for “it” merely postpones our happiness, pushing it further and further away. Even when we do obtain “it,” it is just replaced by yet another, more perfect “it.” To stop waiting to be happy, we have to stop waiting on “it” and accept that “it” will never really be enough.
Not looking at what other people are doing
It’s hard to be happy when you think everyone else is better than you. But it’s easy to think that way when you’re constantly looking at the world through rose-colored glasses — at everyone else’s worlds, that is.
Like when you see a beautiful person in line at the coffee shop, wearing clothes you admire but believe you, yourself, could never “pull off.” Or when you hear so-and-so got a raise and a promotion, while you live in fear of the next round of Big Tech lay-offs. Or whenever you wonder how everyone in your circle seems to be constantly traveling and also eating out all the time and also buying new cars and generally spending money that it feels like somehow everyone else has except for you.
It’s not easy to be happy when you’re living like that, which is why my philosophy for learning how to stop waiting to be happy is turning out quite like my philosophy for learning how to stop wanting things: stop looking. Stop looking ahead at what you need to do and where you wish you could be. Stop looking behind at all your mistakes and what you wish you could undo. Stop looking next door at what everyone else is doing and how you do or don’t measure up.
When you stop looking and longing and reaching and waiting, you can suddenly start being. And I’m realizing, it was never really that difficult after all.
I realize happiness isn’t a switch we can just turn on. Sometimes, before we can even think about feeling happy, we need to cross the first bridge of simply getting through a difficult time. Often, reaching out to friends helps, even if you consider yourself an introvert who wants to retreat when the going gets tough. Other times, we need some space to ourselves, even if you consider yourself an extrovert who avoids alone time. This guide offers advice for both.
For everyone, though, there’s one thing I would encourage you to retreat from (at least some of the time): social media. Spending time offline, I find, is one of the best ways to find more quiet in daily life and just feel better.
Here’s how I quit social media. I hope doing so gives you the same peace of mind and extra time it gave me. (Use it to do something that makes you happy right now.)
Hello, I’m Merry.
I’m an American-raised, Paris-based writer. By day, I work as a technical ghostwriter. Here, I get to write about whatever I want. I call it “A Merry Loner” because I believe that once you can be happy on your own, you can do anything.
I send an email whenever I publish something new. That’s all.
If you think someone would like this post, you can send it to them. (It would honestly mean a lot to me.)
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Learnings from Five Years Living in a Different Country
At the end of October, I’ll have been living in France for 62 months (five years and two months). It feels both not that long and like I’ve been here my entire life.
I moved to France (Toulouse, specifically) one year after the 2020 zenith of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was 24, very in love, and ready to get a redo on what had been a rather lackluster university experience in the USA. Now, I’m almost 30, master’s degree in hand for two years now, and married for four.
Considering I moved out at 21, I’ve spent more of my independent adult life overseas than in my native country. At times, life has felt easier than those of the contemporaries I’ve left behind and, at others, much harder. But I have never regretted my choice.
Living outside of your home country is a funny thing. People like to argue about the differences between words like “immigrant” and “expat” and who has the right to be where. Some other foreigners I’ve met abroad never stop speaking about their homeland and the many ways in which it’s superior to where they are now. Others are positively ashamed of their country of origin. To both, I say, “Nobody gets to decide where they’re born.” To judge people — and, worse, fill in the blanks for their personality and beliefs — based on where they’re from is not only unkind; it’s nonsensical.
Just as living in the same small town for your whole life doesn’t make you uneducated and small-minded, traveling the world and living abroad doesn’t make you worldly, cultured, or intelligent.
I don’t claim to be any of these (though my self-respect would pipe up with a defense for the latter). But after living 24 years in the same small town and then five in a new-to-me continent, I do feel I’ve learned a thing or two. Here are three of them:
No matter where you are, you can always be yourself
I have been known to dress a bit flamboyantly. Even to my old desk job, I sported white pleather go-go boots and a 1970s Civil Air Patrol unisex jumpsuit (sometimes simultaneously). But when I venture into uncharted territory, I hold back.
For my first French classes at the Alliance Française in Toulouse and then for my first university classes at Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, I dressed to be inoffensive and unassuming: a demure black sweater, jeans, and combat boots. It wasn’t until the surroundings became familiar, less daunting, and, in a way, smaller that I let my personality become bigger and my wardrobe, more daring.
This tendency extended beyond textiles into most daily interactions. I spoke less frequently and at a lower volume. I smiled less. I didn’t talk to strangers. I was quick to assume I was wrong. And if someone was rude to me, I turned the other cheek instead of responding with usual feistiness.
It took me many years of living in a different country to start acting like myself again, to lose the feeling of ongoing deference and self-doubt, and to remember what should never have been location-dependent: I always have the right to be myself.
It’s okay to change your mind
Before I took off with a one-way ticket to Paris, my dad pulled me aside and said: “I know you’ve been dreaming about doing this for a year, but if you get there and realize you don’t like it after, you can just come back. It’s not embarrassing. You don’t need to stick it out.”
Embarrassment, now that’s a universal human feeling. Sometimes, when we have big ideas, we fail to act on them or even voice them for fear of losing face if those ideas don’t work out. But it’s okay to try something and fail. It’s also okay to try something and then just change your mind, no matter what it looks like from the outside.
This is a conversation I’ve had with many fellow foreigners living abroad. Having the chance to comfortably move to a new country (particularly, a rich country) is a huge privilege. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it. I have a friend who’s been on a mission to move out of the USA, so she and her wife moved to a Western European country a couple of years ago. They don’t intend to stay. Set on the idea of living abroad, though, they went on a tour, visiting neighboring countries as candidates for a new home.
Still, nothing they saw felt right. Turns out, their checklist for an ideal place to live was matched most closely by their native country, rather than their overseas fantasy.
Things really are that different
When I came to France to study the first time in 2017, I braced myself for the challenges of living without my mother tongue. That was incredibly naive.
While, of course, it was uncomfortable navigating the bank, the hairdresser, and the fast food joint in French, my social life was almost entirely in English. With friends from Poland, Czechia, and Mexico, I made jokes about “Friends” and “Totally Spies” and “The Big Lebowski.” With others from Italy and Germany, I screeched the words to Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.” Naive to the intensity of American hegemony, I was surprised that these American 2000s pop culture staples turned out to just be staples.
It’s another side effect of the Internet and social media. Texting via Facebook Messenger, renting rooms via Airbnb, and following directions via Google can make the whole overseas experience feel comfortably domestic — but deceptively easy. Over time, I’ve come to realize the familiar ease of an “international” language and app-led reservations is a superficial layer that’s only screen deep. Beneath, lie the many unspoken, unseen differences that usually reveal themselves once one or both parties feels insulted, rebuffed, or confused. A short example:
I remember a former American roommate complimenting my “I statements,” a technique from Nonviolent Communication (NVC) where you express your own feelings instead of commenting on others’ actions. But to my Eastern husband who wasn’t assigned Rosenberg’s reading in college or raised in a culture that prizes individuality, these statements weren’t exactly a sign of healthy emotional intelligence. “It’s always ‘I’ with you. ‘I feel this’ or ‘I feel that,’” is a paraphrase of how he understood my NVC conflict strategies during one squabble.
We both spoke the “international” language. We both grew up watching “The Lion King” and “Shrek.” We both remember the hipster, craft beer craze of the 2010s. But that top layer of shared pop culture references masks deeper stratums that make up two very different worldviews.
Often, living in a foreign country can remind us how small the world is and how different people from different walks of life are, at the end of the day, more alike than different. But just as we shouldn’t fill in the blanks for who people are based on where they’re from, we shouldn’t assume we understand someone completely based on a few shared ideas.
Wherever you go, remember yourself
Traveling reveals much to ourselves about our identities; the longer the travel, the more is revealed. But however far you wander and for however long you settle, take care not to lose yourself along the way.
Just because your surroundings change, it doesn’t mean your personality needs to, too. Pushing yourself to try new things is almost always worthwhile, but that doesn’t mean you always have to like it. And new knowledge should never embolden you so much that you forget to remember all you still don’t know.
If you want the experience of stepping outside of your world but are hesitant to move forward, read I Don’t Like Traveling Alone — But I Keep Doing It Anyway, What I Learned Traveling the World Without My Partner, and How to Stop Being Scared of Traveling Alone.
Then, remember why it’s important to enjoy your own company, no matter where you go.
Hello, I’m Merry.
I’m an American-raised, Paris-based writer. By day, I work as a technical ghostwriter. Here, I get to write about whatever I want. I call it “A Merry Loner” because I believe that once you can be happy on your own, you can do anything.
I send an email whenever I publish something new. That’s all.
If you think someone would like this post, you can send it to them. (It would honestly mean a lot to me.)
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A good life begins in your own company.