Emily White - Lonely

INSTRUCTIONS: The following statements describe how people sometimes feel. For each statement, please indicate how often you feel the way described by writing a number in the space provided.

NEVER: 1

RARELY: 2

SOMETIMES: 3

ALWAYS: 4

1. How often do you feel unhappy doing so many things alone? ________
2. How often do you feel you have no one to talk to? ________
3. How often do you feel you cannot tolerate being so alone? ________
4. How often do you feel as if no one understands you? ________
5. How often do you find yourself waiting for people to call or write? ________
6. How often do you feel completely alone? ________
7. How often do you feel unable to reach out and communicate with those around you? ________
8. How often do you feel starved for company? ________
9. How often do you feel it is difficult for you to make friends? ________
10. How often do you feel shut out and excluded by others? ________

SCORING : A total score is computed by adding up the response to each question. The average loneliness score on the measure is 20. A score of 25 or higher reflects a high level of loneliness. A score of 30 or higher reflects a very high level of loneliness.

Dr. Daniel Russell

F ive years ago, I took an introductory painting class. The class was housed in a large white studio, one with huge windows that let in the early evening light. The instructor, a young man with curls and perfectly round eyeglasses, settled a huge stack of books on a table at the side of the room. Hed attached Post-it notes to various pages in each of the books, and he told us to choose a book, and then select one of the paintings to try to copy.

The goal isnt to produce an exact replica, he said, but to pay attention to things like light, and shadow. Ask yourself where the focal point of the painting is, and how the artist draws your attention to that point.

I selected a painting Id never seen before. It was an 1899 print by an artist named Flix Vallotton, called The Visit . I chose it because the color schemea mix of purples and blueswas relatively manageable, and I liked the straightforward arrangement of it. It showed a couple simply embracing at the edge of a room.

I tackled the furniture first, congratulating myself on absolutely nailing a velvety-looking armchair and its accompanying side table. I painted the walls, and a doorway, and a carpet with a pattern of circles and waves. I didnt paint the couple until the end, both because I needed to block the scene out before I added them, and because they were more technically complex than the furniture and rugs.

I did what the instructor told us to do. I told myself not to paint a couple, but to concentrate instead on following the artists line. I carefully set out the mans shoulder, and the straight leg of his trousers, and the fall of the womans skirt as it draped over her shoes. I noticed that their hands came togetherthey were holding them at chest height, as though they had just finished a slow, quiet waltzand then I ran into problems. The line I was trying to follow disappeared. The area between the man and the womanwhere their clothes should have met and mingled, and where their bodies should have brushed up against each otherthat area was all darkness and shadow.

This aspect of the painting hadnt been immediately obvious. In fact, Id been staring at the reproduction for almost two hours before I noticed it. When Id first glanced at the painting, Id seen two bodies. It was only in trying to reproduce the outline that I realized the artist hadthrough an extremely delicate use of shadingactually fused them into one figure.

And the intimacy communicated by that shadoweven through a cheap reproduction, and across a span of what was more than a hundred yearscaught me like a blow to the chest. Id signed up for the painting class because Id been intensely lonely, so lonely that I was willing to pay for at least one evening a week that wouldnt see me returning to my empty flat on my own. Even though the class didnt offer much in the way of conversationmost of the students were focused on their easelsit did offer company, and it gave me the chance to see my behavior reflected in the actions of those around me: I liked the synchronicity of us all opening our tubes of paint, carefully glancing from palette to canvas, and squinting at the fruit and bottles set up at the front of the room.

As the course wore on, and as I grew more familiar with my fellow students, I told myself that I was doing OK, and that I was managingwith nothing in the way of real guidanceto put some distance between myself and the loneliness that seemed to have followed me for the past several years.

That was before I saw the painting. The sight of the man and woman standing so closely together made me remember what real warmth and proximity was like. It made me recognize what Id been missing.

Youve been without that for so long, I thought, staring at the picture. The memory of close connection made my throat tighten; it wasnt soothing so much as painful and disorienting. I felt as though I were being shown a photo of someone well loved, and long dead. I didnt want to be reminded of what I no longer seemed to have.

It was with a sense of defeat that I stopped painting. I was sitting on a hard wooden chair in front of my easel, and I simply dropped my arms to my sides, paintbrush in hand. Suddenly tired, I gathered up my things, and grew quietly angry with my fellow students as they continued to paint. My loneliness, by that point, had become twinned with frustration, with a borderline rage that surfaced whenever I was confronted with the lack of belonging that had come to define my life. I felt the need to escape the studio and lose myself in the summer crowds outside. It wasnt sociability or a sense of connection I was seeking, but just heat and noise and furious movementanything that would block out my sudden and searing sense of aloneness.

I still have my painting of the couple in the living room. For some reason, even though the painting isnt finished, Ive carried it through three moves and across two provinces. I think I keep it as an emblem, as a token of how bad things had gotten, and of how much I still had to endure before my life would change and improve. I keep it also as a reminder, not just of my past, but of what might be my future: no ones discovered a vaccine against loneliness; theres no prayer or charm or safeguard Ive discovered that can be relied on to keep the state at bay for good. The painting is a warning, a message from my own life: Do everything you can to keep the state from returning , it seems to urge. You dont want to go back to those years that you lived.

Many people, over the course of the past several years, have asked me why I would want to write a book about chronic loneliness. The subject, they hint, is embarrassing; its best kept unmentioned. And loneliness, they say, isnt realat least not in the way that depression or bipolar disorder are real. Every word Ive written has been penned against a chorus of Dont and Why bother?

Its too trivial, Ive been told, too shameful, too irrelevant. And it was, after all, just me. Even if my own loneliness was somehow significant, even if it did change my life, derail my health, cloud my intelligence and turn me into someone I didnt used to beall of that was just my problem.