Alone or Lonely

As most of you will recall in my last post I talked about Christmas and it being a tough time without my wife Debra being here with us and maybe just to sort of refresh everybody's memory.

Debra lost a courageous battle with cancer in 2021. Actually it's coming up in February, the anniversary of her passing, so that by itself will be a tough time and actually that fits quite nicely into what I'm talking to you today about is from a grief perspective we talk about being lonely and being alone and I wanted to just provide some insight into what each one of those actually is or are.

So, when we look at at the the state of being alone that's actually a physical state where you are physically by yourself and I'm not sure how many of you who are going through the grieving process have experienced that but it's it's not a it's an unpleasant experience for lack of a better choice of words and lonely if you feel as though you're lonely that's an emotional state where you're actually feeling alone or disconnected from others and where that comes in is you could be at a family gathering but yet you still feel lonely because you in essence you haven't connected with the people that are that are there for the family family gathering and it's very difficult to to be able to kind of decide which path you want to sort of take to be able to interact a little bit more.

I know I find that even still it's kind of a double-edged sword is number one you're you're lonely so you want to connect with all these people you know family members and such but number two is that you can only handle periods of of gathering with people you can only handle just so much of that and then it it becomes a bit onerous and you have a difficult time fitting in and largely do actually truth be known largely due to the fact that society is a couples based society and as a result of that a person who is kind of flying solo is somewhat of an anomaly and doesn't always fit in people have a difficult time trying to determine what they should how they should strike up a conversation what they should say or what they shouldn't say and all those sorts of things.

What's interesting you know that you know when we think of lonely and loneliness and all of that in 2023 which we just left behind us about 52% of people in the United States suffer from feelings of loneliness and so it's not something that we've kind of conjured or dreamt up it's something that's actually there it's real life it's something that we deal with and so my only advice that I can give to you is number one it is part of the grieving process and you are going to undoubtedly at some time point go through that you need to to be able to have some coping skills so whether it's reaching out to other people to to connect with just go and have a coffee and you know so you keep that time frame compressed but yet you're still feeding and nurturing the need for for contact or you know fulfilling the need of having to to deal with being alone and being lonely at this I guess at the same time, so I I would encourage you that if you've got questions please you know send them to me and we can certainly have a conversation about how I go through that process and maybe in future posts I will elaborate a bit further on how I deal with that being being alone and being lonely are two things that are that I struggle with on on a daily weekly basis so you would not be alone if you felt the same and and we together we can probably work this out and go from there so I hope that you have a great day and God bless!