Lonely Boy didn’t really start out as a book. That wasn’t the intention. It began as a journalling exercise. There were parts of my life that I wasn’t happy with – parts of myself I wasn’t happy with. And I wanted to figure the problem out. I wanted to find my blind spots, find the flaws and faults I was ignoring and address them head on.
And so I began. I wrote every day for weeks, and then months. And quite soon I had 20,000 words written. And it was opening up reflections I had never considered before. I began to see that this journal could become something else. It could become an open and honest reflection. A series of essays that looked inward to investigate the role I was playing in my own unhappiness. There were so many doors open, so many beds to look under for monsters. Although the journal began as an attempt to decode my failing relationships, the book became so much more than that.
Lonely Boy begins by attempting to figure out why I became so lonely after my friend died by suicide. Why I couldn’t let it go, and why it seemed as though I refused to move on. I thought his death was the root of this loneliness, but this hasn’t turned out to be the case. A disposition for aloneness has been present for my entire life, like some sort of genetically coded substructure. His death exacerbated the issue, possibly confirming to my subconscious mind that being alone is better than becoming attached, because there’s no danger of being hurt by loss when you’re alone. After he died I spiralled into my own depression, and became the most lonely version of me I had ever been.
I feared spending time alone. This fear is primed in part by our world. How we’re encouraged to constantly stay connected. In our world, spending time alone is strange, unusual, undesirable. We avoid it all costs, and I think this resistance results in a fear of being alone. Not all time spent alone need by lonesome, but for a long time for me, it was.
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This fear of being alone juxtaposed with my inability to form successful relationships. I was afraid to open up, to be vulnerable, because I didn’t want to get hurt again. I’d been hurt badly in my first ever relationship, and this experience wounded my ability to trust and to be vulnerable. And so my answer to this problem in my early twenties was to never open up, to never be vulnerable. While this closed me off to hurt from the outside, it invariably led to being hurt from the inside. I was a man who did not want to be alone, who would not allow himself to be with someone in any real way.
From a young age I also become aware of death and the fear of it held me fast. I became sensitive, thoughtful, reflective. Whereas life made total sense for others, it made little sense to me. I always felt outside of life in subtle, little ways. The loneliness of this was ever-present. It was there at sunset in the summer, the familiar dread of something good coming to an end.
And so, Lonely Boy is an attempt to figure out this great puzzle. What was I doing, how was I behaving, what was I leaving unaddressed? But also, how am I still playing a role in my own unhappiness, and how do I get to a place where I can stop working against myself?
For me, the antidote to stigma around mental health is talking about our struggles openly and earnestly. Not in a self-indulgent way; I mean the raw aspects of our mental lives. Talking about times when we let ourselves down, when we made poor decisions, when we hurt people, is as important as talking about when we were hurt by other people. Humans are imperfect. We all fail. We all have flaws. And I believe that looking inward, addressing these flaws and accepting them, is essential for knowing who we truly are. When we know we truly are – the good and the bad parts – then this will lead is to consistent wellbeing, because we are no longer ignoring issues that need to be addressed.
Each time someone talks about their mental life, it may inspire another to do the same, and through this snowball effect we can normalise the chat around mental health.
When we talk about our mental health it does two things. It allows us to vent our emotions, to get them out from inside, helping us to process them and move on. But, even more pertinent than that in today’s world, talking about your mental health alerts other people. It’s a Call to Adventure. When you talk about your mental health, then people know that they too can talk about theirs, and that you are someone who will listen to them without judgement. And so each time someone talks about their mental life, it may inspire another to do the same, and through this snowball effect we can normalise the chat around mental health.
And this is the motivation behind turning my journal into a book called Lonely Boy. It’s a frank conversation with the reader about mental health in the hope that the honesty here will provoke someone else to talk about their mental health, too.
Lonely Boy is an attempt to make sense of it all; of my embedded disposition for aloneness, of losing my best friend, of struggling to make relationships work. The journey inward is the most difficult one, and it’s also the easiest one to ignore embarking upon. But it essential. This has been essential, and my hope is that in reading the revelations I’ve uncovered, you’ll embark upon your own quest for meaning too.
Our job is not to be liked by everyone, but rather, to become who we truly are.
Lonely Boy is published by BookHub Publishing.
