Earlier this week I listened to a podcast
where Brené Brown interviewed Vivek Murthy on his book ‘Together: The Healing
Power of Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World’. Murthy was the 19th
Surgeon General of the USA, and his view of that role was that he would focus
on the opioid epidemic, obesity, heart disease, mental health and other
preventable diseases. Instead what he found himself hearing and observing was
the concept of loneliness being repeated over and over. In the podcast with
Brené he speaks to the sadness he felt watching people die alone in hospital.
He observes in his travels around the US in his role as Surgeon General how
disconnected people are from each other emotionally and how much shame there is
in admitting to feeling lonely. Murthy speaks specifically about lonely highly
driven professionals are, for example medicine or law; professions which promote
independent and strength as a virtue, and which see vulnerability as weakness. People
are feeling acute loneliness while being surrounded by others, and this
loneliness is a result of emotional isolation or a person not being comfortable
internally. I have written recently about learning to be an introverted
extrovert and embracing my solitude, and Murthy speaks to the distinction we
must make between solitude and loneliness. I feel both, but I will return to
this momentarily.
The society we currently live in prides success
in what our profession is profession, our monetary and material gains, over
community and connection. Murthy asks us to differentiate between subjective
and objective loneliness – we can be surrounded by people in our lives but
still feel subjective loneliness, and this is different from being objectively isolated
from others or physically alone. I would ask you to reflect on this for a
moment and think of yourself in a crowded room, or indeed on a crammed bus of
people or sitting in a meeting at work, or at home with your family, and you
stop and think to yourself I feel very lonely right now. I think a lot about
mobility, community and belonging (and I have written about this in recent
times) as it has had a profound effect on my feelings of loneliness over the
years and indeed I think of it a lot in our current pandemic. Our modern world
enables us to be very mobile and of course to be virtually connected, but this
is never going to be the same being face-to-face on a daily basis with a
community (family, friends and/or colleagues) who you feel emotionally
connected to.
Murthy speaks to the extreme loneliness
which comes when we focus more on wealth, reputation or power over our social connections.
In a recent entry I spoke to my acquaintances in Vancouver and how much I felt
the void of their presence during the lock-down here. As things have opened up
in the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to connect with some and it
has been wonderful to do so. I think the most powerful aspect of connecting
with people outside our immediate circles is that it exposes our humanity in a
different way. I need to unpack this statement even as I write it, I am
thinking through what I mean. With relationships we have had all our lives,
family, neighbours, religious institutions, we fall into patterns of behaviour
or we perform roles that we have been taught or have developed habitually over
time. We also tend to develop relationships based on context, people who live
in the same area as us, people at work, people we went to school or university
with. People do this so that they objectively never feel alone, but they then
ignore the subjective loneliness – the loneliness that over time cause us to
disconnect more and more from the most important relationship of all, the one
we have with ourselves. In interacting with my acquaintances I always find it
interesting to observe how easy it is because I have no expectations of them
and they none of me.
Now I personalize my own experience with
loneliness and really appreciate how Murthy’s thoughts in his interview (I have
yet to read the entire book) helped me shape a lot of thinking I have been
doing during the pandemic. I start with the positive as is just good common courtesy!
Recent personal events in my life have forced me to address a deep fear I had
of being alone, a fear that came from a place of shame and a place of feeling
that I was not good enough. I felt this shame and sense of not being enough in
all aspects of my life: with family, with friends, in romantic relationships
and even in my professional life. In beginning my academic position at UBC in 2013,
I found myself feeling like an ‘accidental academic’ in a department where I
was not accomplishing enough. I choose the route of an education focused role
in academia because it is what I am passionate about, but it is not the ‘norm’
in a profession that is ultimately very hierarchical and based on ‘output’. Outside
of work over the years I have surrounded myself with people in different
contexts simply so I would have someone ‘to do things with’ without really
reflecting on how they really made me feel. Then of course there is expectation
– I have been hard on myself most of my life, the not being good enough voice –
and in being hard on myself I funneled this my expectations of others. I wanted
people I cared about to make me feel better, to take away my shame, but most of
all to take away my loneliness.
So social connections are indeed fundamental
to our lives as Murthy rightly emphasizes, and I dearly hope that in learning
from the current pandemic we can reflect on how important those connections are
to us. That said simply surrounding ourselves with people or maintaining
relationships which do not serve us simply so we do not have to be objectively alone
will only push us further into subjective loneliness. The first social
connection we all need to focus on is the one we have with ourselves, the one
connection that will always be there no matter where one goes in life. In addressing
my fear and shame I have been able to banish objective loneliness at its most
fundamental level. I really do enjoy my own company and hours of bike riding,
writing, colouring, yoga, dancing around the living room, over the past three
months have brought me so much joy. Do not misunderstand me I am still very
much an extrovert by nature and I thrive on my social connections with people,
but I have a much stronger sense now of what those connections can and should
look like. I have realistic expectations of others because I have realistic
expectations of myself. If being with someone or talking with someone does not
make me feel good, as I learn to listen to my intuition more, I respect my
boundary and of course theirs. Not every single person I have in my life will
give me exactly what I want, that impossible and frankly a little selfish of me
to think they would; but in listening and observing people’s interactions with
me and my reactions to them I can learn what to expect from them. I do feel loneliness,
I am human. I crave a romantic partner in my life, a companion who is my emotional
equal and who wants to share life’s adventures with me. I have a formidable
global community of friends, but they are far away and I will not see them this
summer as I had intended. I thirst for a stronger community of people in
Vancouver to experience things with, to have great conversations and debates
with, to try to change the world with (even if it is only one small action). I
desire more acknowledgement and connection with colleagues at my university
with the same passion for teaching and learning as me. Ultimately though I will
not sacrifice my own sense of well-being for anyone simply to avoid feeling
physically alone…
