Feeling Isolated

You can be in a room full of people and still be the only one in it. That’s the kind of isolated I mean. Not alone — I’m rarely actually alone. There are people around me all day. Conversations happen. I’m in them. And somehow none of it reaches me.

It’s like there’s a pane of glass between me and everyone else. I can see them fine. They can see me. We wave, we talk, we laugh at the right moments. But nothing actually passes through. Everything that gets to me arrives muffled, and everything I send out seems to land somewhere slightly off from where I aimed it.

The strange part is I can’t point to anything anyone did. Nobody shut me out. Nobody stopped inviting me, stopped talking to me, stopped caring — at least not in any way I could prove. It’s more like I drifted a few feet outside of my own life and nobody noticed, including me, until the distance was already there.

And then you’re stuck with the question that makes it worse: do I say something? Because saying “I feel alone” to people who are standing right next to you feels ridiculous. It feels like an accusation. So you don’t say it. You just keep showing up, keep doing the impression of someone who’s present, and the gap gets a little wider because now there’s one more thing you’re not saying.

I keep thinking connection is supposed to just happen — that if the people are there, the closeness should be too. But maybe that’s the lie in all this. The people being there is just proximity. The rest of it takes something I haven’t had the energy to give in a long time.

So for now I’m just naming it. I’m here, surrounded, and lonely anyway. If you’ve felt that, you know exactly how little sense it makes and how real it is at the same time.