Being a Loner or Outsider...

[ënagualí~ᏉLAᗪἇ ኔጡ።]

Being a Loner or Outsider...

Ever just got so used to being lonely that it feels normal to you now? Like waking up, going to work or school, coming home and seeing 0 messages on your phone, zero missed calls. No plans for the weekend or nights. No success with dating apps and other shallow social media programs claiming to "connect" individuals.
Or you interact with people online for months or years only to have them ghost you for their own reasons all of a sudden even if you've done nothing wrong to make them do it..in other words they show you their true colours eventually..
Or going out to a club only to just stand there awkwardly with a drink in your hand watching groups dance and talk having fun think "how do they reach that point?"

But strangely enough still feeling content with it. Because it makes every meaningful social interaction much more memorable and important. I think people take social attention for granted. Most people aren't interested in making friends unless it's somewhat beneficial to their reputation or provides their ego with a reward of some sort...

.

It's technology that benefits those who need it the least. And leaves the ones who actually need it most behind even further. Being lonely is so common because it's a status that severely impacts the ability to make connections. You can't connect the dots if you don't even have any to connect to.

Loneliness is when you can’t connect to anyone but feel the strong desire to have some emotional support, loneliness is when you don’t have friends or family,...

Loneliness IS when you start lying to your colleagues that you've seen some friends during the weekend while you just spent two days totally alone.
Loneliness is if you have friends, yet you still feel left out and betrayed staying around with them.
Loneliness is missing human interaction to the point where you feel something is wrong with you, loneliness is when your self worth is measured by how important are you to others, loneliness is the suffocating feeling of drowning in your emotions, hoping for someone to save you but knowing at the same time that no one will!

So How Can This Be Changed..

Loneliness is a paradox. The more lonely you feel the more detached you become. The more detached the more distant you make yourself. This grows until people can talk to you and you cant even listen. Your mind is preoccupied by itself and your so used to being alone you crave it. Your friends if you had any to begin with grow further and you grow less dependent on them.

And then you wake up one morning and everyone is gone, or you break off a relationship and the friends you thought you had just disappear & go off with it, and you wonder where they really your friends or his/hers and you've built then a wall keeping them away cos they bring back memories of the other half all over again... It can happen to anybody. Social isolation is a killer. Once you get to far away it's very hard to come back. I wish we could all connect and be living solutions to one another..
What I've found most helpful is having my cup of coffee or tea, getting out the door, and going for a walk. Open your eyes on the walk, let go of your self absorption, be open to any nature around you.

Yet even I know this world has lost its hands on relatability. We are all dying because of social deconstructing and the problem is getting worse.. Spirituality has taken a backseat and our old people are warehoused into nursing homes every day as if they dont matter anymore in the society...and yet they were our greatest of teachers..

Humans have lost the ability to listen accurately, and pass people off with no compassion or empathy. In my line of work I come across so many youngsters who tell me they are lonely and yet they have people around them, but this kind of loneliness goes way deeper, I hear words like,.. that they stay at work late because there is no one to go home to... they look forward to sitting in heavy traffic because they feel a little less lonely and there is nothing to do at home anyway. Besides, getting home later makes their neighbors think they actually have a life or maybe they are out dating a pretty girl/guy or generally socialising... they constantly think about where to go to meet new people, but never seem to come up with a good answer so they stay home. It is a never ending circle that they cannot get out of...and its worse in a small community where the night life is none existent and even the restaurant's & takeout food industry is limited

Please allow me to offer this small token of advice:

#. Learn to love and accept yourself, self-soothe, and enjoy doing things by yourself. If you don't enjoy yourself, why should anybody else? If you feel unworthy or are anxious, it will be hard to form and maintain relationships.

#. Join groups that are doing something that interests you. Meet up is a great way to start. Keep attending these groups and join new ones to make friends with people there.

#. Volunteer to help people via charities, after school programs, etc. When you help someone, you're not alone and it opens up ways to meet people.

#. If you live in an isolated area, move so you can be closer to places where you have easier access to activities and people.

#. Travel. When you take a trip, you are forced to be more social, ask for directions, seek help, learn new things, and be open-minded. You're increasing neuroplasticity.

#. Think of someone you haven't spoken to a long time you miss. Is it time to make amends? Get connected? That could be an opportunity for friendship and closeness.

Conclusion: Do these things and guaranteed you will not be alone, and slowly and gradually you will befriend people and they will form your social circle and support. The worst thing to do is to settle for being lonely and not take action.

As Its no wonder the suicide rate has risen since covid,.. I supervised covid test sites during the pandemic. I interacted with thousands of people coming in from all distances & directions, but made very few meaningful connections because I was a ghostly apparition covered from head to toe with PPE, yet I noticed that peoples mental health had taken a huge dive in a downwards spiral.. no one was smiling, people were in fear, I sensed all their emotions of trauma along with the isolation..it certainly sucked being an empath during that time that's for sure..

However confined at home myself, I began to think and I looked around at all the things I'd been saving "for good" and I decided that 'For Good' Had Arrived. So for the rest of the pandemic, I used the  For Good china, the  For Good utensils, and I dressed up for dinner by candlelight (the Good candles, of course). I wore my 'For Good' jewelry for virtual meetings, and when we were allowed back in the office, I wore my 'For Good cloths' & shoes every day.

The compliments and connections that followed were amazing I felt like a new person entirely - and it turns out that wearing my 'For Good' clothes is just plain fun...there really was no point them sitting in the wardrobe & drawers gathering dust I thought, even the buzzy bright coloured geographic shaped shirt my sister bought for one of my birthdays that at the time I thought just wasn't my taste at all  yet accepted it gracefully and  yet was likely never to touch my body, and even thinking at the time just what was she thinking in getting it for me, as it was not my common shade of black, well guess what... it got worn and the compliments just flowed again.. so yeah Good Had Arrived, and my life was Good with it.

As a social extrovert and person who has been the one to reach out to others my whole life, I am realising people have also lost the grasp on how to be a true friend to people. We were all meant to have family and buddies we are social creatures after all.

The older we all get, the fewer friends we seem to have in life. So here’s to all the people that are lonely, you are all wonderful people and wishing a phenomenal day to you all..
Keep your head up and love yourself and dont worry just get out there and wear your 'For Good Cloths' before the moths get to them.....as tomorrow may not be just another day..

Raven Leads My Way Again..

Ꮙℓἇ∂ἇ..aka Reɪvən ღ

©- All Right Reserved

[ënagualí~ᏉLAᗪἇ ኔጡ።]

Oh geepers, that's not good to just hand them out willy nilly to kids as their brains are still developing,... they thus are ignoring the main issue that causes it too, depression massively contributes to an inability to ACQUIRE friends but to just medicate is not solving the main issue, in that skills have been lost due to none socialisation during a horrid restricting period in our lives, they are just adding another mask really ..

I'm not fully against anti-depressants for the right reasons, but they can actually exasperate a underlying un-diagnosed health condition too, so assuming the depression is not secondary to some other remediable disorder [e.g. an endocrinopathy, an underlying sleep disorder, a malabsorption syndrome, a chronic pain or inflammatory condition, etc.], a low dose antidepressant lets say Lorazapam as a simple example and perhaps a second or third medicine can help people cope with depression staving off bio-psychsocial disaster,.. until such time as the said depression [hopefully] remits, and in many cases can make a world of difference. The only person who might desire or enthusiastically begin a antidepressant especially a teenager.. is likely to have some sort of other problem [e.g. "a personality disorder"; or he or she might simply underestimate how difficult life actually is;  or he or she maybe attempting to secure a secondary gain such as an serreptitious diagnosis of chronic disability due to refractory depression ]

Adding psychotherapy, regularising routine, eating three square healthy meals a day, employing good sleep hygiene, outdoor physical activity and engaging in somewhat meaningful social activities with their peers are all more helpful and recommended, though sometimes depending on the client easier said than done though, and maybe this is why those Doctors over there are just handing out antidepressants to get them through that difficult time.. its so not right though, considering how good your NHS mental health care system is in the UK..

But add that we all know the most unknown area of the human body is the brain, if you notice, there is no detailed explanation for any serious mental illnesses,. It is not known how and why depression even arises though is likely more emotional related  thus psychological issues. The brain is very unknown, we have no idea how antidepressants impact the brain, we only know basic things like symptoms. The scariest thing is that psychiatrists, psychologists and the pharmaceutical industry itself give a very simplistic image of this type of medication. They compare it to painkillers. Comparing something that is completely unknown to what it can do to our brain, many people report loss of emotions, several recent studies show that antidepressants can cause a neural disconnection in various parts of the brain.

A new study even says that with just a single dose of medication, a single pill can change your brain structure forever, it can completely change your brain architecture. We are talking about the brain, the most important and complex organ in the human body. Less than 100 years ago, the medicine of psychology also claimed that lobotomy cured everything, and later discovered that it destroyed the brain, took away all of a person's intelligence, and often left them completely incapacitated. Shortly afterwards, the pharmaceutical industry discovered these new anti-depressant drugs, which at the time put an end to lobotomy, but it was discovered at times that it was as terrible as a lobotomy, and thus came to be considered a chemical lobotomy.

However, with the lack of resources at the time, psychiatry needed to hold on to something aye, so they quickly changed their discourse saying that they had new studies, and psychology is the most recent medicine in history, its only like 200 years old I think?, which explains a lot. Today's drugs are still very unknown and in the brain even more so, but as it is something profitable, there is no great interest in making major changes, as its all about the money.. in addition, many mental health doctors have always prescribed this type of medication throughout their career, and for them, when new studies appear on the negative and dangerous side of them, it is easier for them to close their eyes, than to leave their jobs and have to accept that their careers were made based on medication prescriptions that are not the real truth... healing but mitigating, often people who take antidepressants lose negative emotions sure, but they also lose the ability to feel positive emotions too, now whether this is temporary or not is something I don't know, I'm not a Dr but we already know that there are new studies that tell us that these change the brain structure forever, the brain will never be the same after the first pill, which is why we should be careful with these medicines coming from a scientific field that are less than 200 years old!

  Finally, I want to highlight an extremely important point:.. that is a chemical dependence, these medications cause severe dependence in many cases, being as serious as alcohol, the world health organization itself warns that there is no specific "detoxification" for this type of antidepressant medications. There are treatment centers for alcoholics, for example, but not for this type of medication, there is no scientifically proven way to detox! In other words, we are dealing with medications that, in addition to still being a mystery as to how exactly they act on the brain, a most unknown organ in the human body, they cause an addiction that not even psychiatrists know how to treat!

Covid certainly did a huge amount of mental health damage to so many youngsters when they should have been working towards career goals and feel like they had some solid basis to stand on & the elderly too who just dont have the correct learned coping mechanisms to get over their loneliness issues, they feel isolated and ignored in society..

It must have been hard for your son not being able to be with his partner during a very scary time, yet being a well adjusted adult no real damage was done that he couldn't recover from by the sounds despite how hard it must have been for them both.. they both had support & friends & family support as well, some kids & families here in this town I live in didn't have any of this at all, and its these kids who suffered the most during that time..

[Julie]

Yes covid or the way covid was brought into the world, and the way the whole situation was handled wasn't at all right.  Covid impacted our family in many ways and if it did that then it did that to us as a family it did that to others too.  It's like the world has gone mad...I heard not so long ago that doctors were putting children on anti-depressants.  

My son was down in London at the time, he'd been living there for a few months when lock-down occurred.  Later on in 2020 we were allowed to Bubble which meant that he could see his girlfriend but couldn't bubble with his family or see us but we managed to keep in touch on Skype.  And yes a lonely time for everyone.  The company he worked for then paid for a taxi to take him up north to see her, I think the advice then was not to use public transport.

[ënagualí~ᏉLAᗪἇ ኔጡ።]

There are just so many lonely people coming out of the woodworks like beetles right now its like something is really gone wrong in the world and I really believe covid had a lot to do with it...  I've realised it on the kids' perspectives. This is the impact of the restrictions and youngsters have lost the ability to garner important social skills they would have learnt in school but because they were at home it wasn't gained. So now they have become introverts in a sense and loneliness comes with it.. Not only did it effect kids in this way but its been a roll on effect into their education standards as well, the NCEA levels all dropped dramatically its a real concern...also in many other avenues too, including our economy & our medical industry now..I'm sure not only in this country either..it seems to be ongoing & never ending, its been a complete restructuring of our world, and the changing for everyone isn't over still, as Covid is still active..

[Julie]

very well written and loads of good points Vlada, thank you