Lonely in the Life You've Built
On the particular ache of midlife friendship
Reading: Letters from Midlife — When You Feel Lonely · Kiran Singh
How do you find your people again when the social structures that used to deliver them no longer apply?
Friendship in your twenties happens to you. School, work, the apartment with the broken window — the friends arrive because the circumstances arrange them. Friendship in midlife is closer to gardening. Nothing comes up on its own. The plants you want, you plant.
The loneliness in midlife is not always about having no one. Often it is about having people who knew an earlier version of you and have not been updated, and not yet having the new version of the room — the friends who know the current weather. Building that second room takes longer than anyone admits.
The work is unromantic and slow and worth doing.
Source
essay:
Letters from Midlife — When You Feel Lonely by Kiran Singh