How painful can loneliness feel sometimes…? Especially when no one around you can understand you or what you’re going through. It can be very painful. Like a deep throbbing pain in your heart and stomach that takes away all your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual energy. It’s a real thing and that's why you struggle to get out of bed in the morning, you hit the snooze button or you don’t even set the intention to wake up at a certain time. 

Loneliness kills. It’s a leading cause of suicide in both men and women. It destroys dreams, hopes and glory for the millions of individuals. 

It’s a silent killer, it creeps up on you when you least expect it and it brews below the surface until it’s too noticeable to be ignored. And when we notice that slow build-up in the early stages we tend to push it to the side, sweep it under the rug and ignore it until it’s too late. We humans have a habit of ignoring things until it is too late. 

It’s like you are stranded in the middle of the deep dark ocean, alone in a little paddle boat with nothing but countless directions to go in, no sight of anything but water and your thoughts. There is no one for miles and you choose not to believe that but you know it’s true. You can admit it to yourself but you still hold back at the hope someone is out there and will come save you.

The brutal reality of life is that is a fantasy. You have to paddle yourself out of the situation you are in. Everyone does and that’s the beauty people miss, you are alone but you are also not alone. There are people just like you in their own little boat working with their own loneliness. 

Eventually, everyone will find the bigger boat, the one you and many others will be paddling towards and didn’t know you needed. One big boat for everyone that’s in the same stage as you. And once you hop in you will feel a lightness, your loneliness is not all gone magically, that is going to take work, self-work. But there will be a sense of familiarity and camaraderie in the air, all your final destinations are different, but your journeys are the same. 

It doesn't matter what you’ve been through, how you’ve been through it, when you've been through it or who you were when you went through it. On a universal level, thousands, if not millions of other people have gone through this exact same thing, sometimes more than once. 

There is a reason why AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) is a support group environment and it’s always worked. Everyone is going through the same thing, they are all in the same boat and that helps deal with the loneliness. Overcoming the addiction is hard enough, why go through it alone? 

That is just one example, there are many others I can share with you. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, you can find people who have gone through or are going through what you are right now.

It’s often not the things that break us down and defeat us but it is the fact that we feel we have to face them alone and that is a terrifying experience. It doesn’t have to be the case, it’s ok. The boat is out there, you just have to find it, the right people are already in there, you just have to search for it. 

You are alone.

You are not alone.

You are right either way. And when the time comes to overcome whatever it is you need to, which one of those did you want to be? 

Find The Boat and you’ll never feel alone again. 

Until next time,

Brody 

PS

Thank you to my colleague David for sparking the inspiration to write this.