AWC Loneliness Essay 03: The Different Faces Of Loneliness
Being Alone.
August 2026
Loneliness is a strange feeling.
It can affect everyone differently and come at different points in our lives.
The more I've thought about loneliness throughout this project, the more I've started to see it in two ways:
Having no one.
Having people around you, but still feeling alone
The first is probably what most of us think about when we hear the word loneliness.
Sometimes people genuinely find themselves with no one to call or spend time with. Sometimes it’s friendships fading over time. Sometimes it’s moving somewhere new and not knowing anyone. Sometimes it’s losing someone who was an important part of our life.
And I think what surprised me the most is just how many people have felt this way.
Research from the British Red Cross found that 1 in 3 UK adults often felt like they had no one to turn to.
But the more I thought about loneliness, the more I realised that having people around you doesn't always stop you from feeling it.
What happens when you do have people around you, but still feel alone?
You may have friends. You may have family. You may have a partner or colleagues you get along with.
But you still don't feel seen or supported.
I think that's where loneliness becomes more complicated.
Because having people in your life and feeling like you have someone are not always the same thing.
This is the side of loneliness that I understand more personally.
There have been times when I've had people around me who I could technically talk to, but I still felt like I had to deal with certain things by myself.
Sometimes I didn't want to burden anyone with what I was going through. Other times, I thought I could just deal with it myself.
So I would say “I'm fine” and carry on with my life.
I think a lot of us probably do that. And that's the strange thing.
The people around you can genuinely care about you and still have no idea that you're feeling lonely.
Through the research I've been doing for the “AWC PhD”, I started to realise that some of these feelings weren't just personal to me.
No matter how many people I interviewed or how many survey responses I collected, similar themes kept coming up.
“I just want to connect on a genuine level.”
“I want to be understood.”
These answers made me realise that:
There is no salary attached to feeling understood.
There is no award for having someone you can call when things get difficult.
We don't really measure these things in the same way we measure success.
But when I listened to people's answers, they seemed to matter just as much, if not more.
It made me question what it actually means to have someone.
Is it enough to have friends?
Is it enough to have family?
Or is connection something deeper than simply having people around us?
For me, I think it comes down to having someone you feel like you can actually talk to.
Someone who hears you.
Someone who understands you.
And someone who reminds you that when things aren't going well, you don't have to deal with everything by yourself.
Maybe that's why loneliness can be so difficult to spot.
We tend to imagine a lonely person as someone who is physically alone.
But sometimes they aren't.
Sometimes it's your friend, someone in your family or someone you work with.
Maybe even you.
This essay is not an attempt to solve loneliness.
It is an attempt to understand it.
What does it actually mean to be there for someone?
How well do we really know the people closest to us?
And when someone tells us they're fine, how often do we stop and wonder if they actually are?
This project has made me think more about the people I have around me, but also about the type of person I am to them.
Because maybe connection isn't just about having someone there for us.
It's also about making sure the people we care about know we're there for them.
__________________________________________________________
References
British Red Cross
Always Working Clothing 5 month Research (AWC PhD)
