Posts about loneliness

Being surrounded and still alone, a phone that does not ring, a room that is too quiet. People write here about a thing that is hard to admit out loud — and find they are not the only one.

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Anonymous 2026/10/08 I co-signed my daughter's student loans in 2014 and I will be seventy-one when they're finished and she doesn't know that number. I'm fifty-eight. She's twenty-nine. She's a physical therapist, she's good at it, she's not irresponsible, and none of this is a s…

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Anonymous 2026/09/27 The thing I can't say at a dinner party is that the best teaching job I have ever had is inside a prison. Before this I was in a public high school for eleven years. I left in 2016 after a year I don't want to describe in detail — it involved an administration…

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Anonymous 2026/10/04 I stopped drinking fourteen months ago and nobody threw me a parade, and I want to write about why that turned out to be the good version. I wasn't the kind of drunk that makes a story. I never got a DUI. I never missed work, never embarrassed anybody at a wed…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I’ve been married for years and I recently realized that I don’t fantasize about another woman, I fantasize about living alone, and somehow that scares me more than if I were attracted to somebody else because at least then I could point to a problem. My wife …

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Anonymous 2026/10/06 Practical question, and please skip the "mental health is health" line — I believe it, it doesn't help me. How do I tell my employer I need FMLA for a mental health reason? My situation, concretely. I'm thirty-six, I've been at this company six years, software…

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Anonymous 2026/09/24 My son is a police officer and I've stopped telling people what he does. He's twenty-eight. He's been on four years, in a mid-sized department in a state I'm not going to name. I raised him. I taught him to be decent and he is decent — I want that on the recor…

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Anonymous 2026/09/23 My mother has been on my employer's health insurance for three years as a dependent and she doesn't live with me. I'm thirty-nine. She's seventy-one, in Ohio, four hours away. I live outside Chicago with my wife and one kid. Here's what's actually true and wha…

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Anonymous 2026/09/19 Nobody in my life knows that I have no retirement savings at all, and I'm fifty-two. There was a 401k. There was a decent one. In 2019 my son went into treatment for the second time and the good program, the one with an actual success rate, was out of network …

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Anonymous 2026/09/26 I wrote a memoir that sold about four hundred thousand copies and my name is nowhere on it, and I've been fine with that for eleven years until about six months ago. I'm a ghostwriter. Fifty-four. I've written nine books for other people — two business books, …

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Anonymous 2026/09/17 There are ninety seconds from 2017 I have never described to another human being, including the three people who were in the room with me. I work approach control at a facility I won't name. Forty-six, wife, two kids, a pension I can see from here. First, so y…

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Anonymous 2026/10/03 I work in a warehouse where my rate is on a screen and I want to describe what that does to a person over four years. The job is picking. An item on a shelf, into a tote, scan, next. The target where I am is a hundred and eighty-four units an hour. There's a h…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I'm a claims adjuster and I've denied claims I knew were valid, and I want to describe how that actually happens, because it isn't the way people imagine. Fourteen years, property and casualty, mostly residential. I'm the person who comes to your house after t…

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Anonymous 2026/09/27 I'm thirty-four, I've had an ostomy since 2022, and I have been seeing a man for five months and he does not know. Ulcerative colitis, diagnosed at twenty-three. Nine years of escalating treatment and then an emergency in March 2022 and a subtotal colectomy, a…

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Anonymous 2026/10/04 I used my daughter's college fund to keep my business alive, and I put it back, and she still doesn't know. The account had thirty-one thousand in it. Started when she was two, a little every month for sixteen years, plus money from her grandparents at Christm…

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