‘i would never be part of anything. i would never really belong anywhere, and i knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. always something would go wrong. i am a stranger and i always will be, and after all i didn’t really care.’ - jean rhys
i am writing this the day after my first ever proper birthday party, after finishing my undergraduate degree in my bedroom on a completely ordinary tuesday, after finalising the editorial process of a poetry manuscript that’s been two years in the making, after ordering chow mein for dinner. it’s sunny at seven o’clock in the evening, which gives me the illusion of timelessness, of immortality. there is a dead rat on the road outside my house, its entrails strewn across the concrete. i am underslept and hungover. occasionally i want to go back on antidepressants, after a long few years without them, but as awful as i feel, i want to be able to feel it.
by all accounts i had a great time. i caught up with old friends i hadn’t seen in months, i turned the music up too loud, i texted people i shouldn’t have. i came alive for a moment in a way that i don’t do very often anymore. my housemates bought me a cake. everybody sang for me. everybody loved me. and yet this morning, laying half-asleep tangled up in my hello kitty pyjamas, i could form only one thought.
i wish i had someone to wake up to.
evidently, the echoes of growing up lonely haven’t quite faded yet.
my mother used to tell me that i was bad at being a child, but that i’d make a really good adult. i was ahead of my time, she said. i was mature for my age. for example, i didn’t have a lot of access to cartoons, so my favourite shows growing up were how i met your mother and the big bang theory. i swept my hair across my forehead and loved folk music. i was the two worst things a little girl can be: ‘weird’ and ‘annoying.’ these words still follow me. anyone can call me a bitch and i’ll laugh it off - i’ll probably agree - but if someone i cared about called me annoying i think i would cry myself to death on the spot.
what i mean to say is that when i started school, i was immediately and recognisably different, and i resented it in myself. but even now, try as i might, every time i make an attempt to fit in, it falls flat.
if i wasn’t at school, i had nobody to talk to but my mother, which had its own issues. between her constant need to work and the way our personalities clashed, i learned to get used to being alone. i cooked with my headphones on, i cleaned with my headphones on, i ate dinner in my bedroom (with my headphones on.)
i used to think i was an introvert, but i’ve since realised it’s less out of a preference for my own company and more out of a need to find familiarity in discomfort. i am not happy when i’m alone. i am not calm. if anything, i feel the opposite - i start talking to my stuffed animals just to feel like there’s someone on my side. my phone use shoots up to an all-time high because i must fill every second of silence with music. of course, this didn’t happen overnight. but it was unavoidable. from the moment i was born to the moment i moved out of my mother’s house, the threat of loneliness grew - slowly, and always when i wasn’t looking - until it was the only sight on the horizon.
i could blame my mother for always working, or for sending me to school so far away from where i lived, stunting my chance to develop any connections beyond ‘classroom friends.’ i could blame the industry in which she works, notorious for overworking and underpaying those who are willing to take it on. i could blame my parents for not getting married, buying a bigger house, having more children. or i could thank them for not having to get divorced, for not bringing anyone else into in their ill-fated relationship. i could blame myself for being born with a brain that works against itself every step of the way.
i chased blame for a long time. it is still my first response to any inconvenience. who can i punish for this? and believe me, i punished my mother a lot. but how could she have known that growing up in books was anything other than what i wanted? how could she have known that every time i blew out my birthday candles (surrounded by her friends, because it was her party too) i wished for a best friend? she did the best she could, and i definitely didn’t make it easy for her.
as usual, fiona apple felt it first. i think about this quote from a 2006 interview all the time:
'when i was a kid - 10, 11, 12, 13 - the thing i wanted most in the world was a best friend. i wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. i wanted to just be close to somebody. and back then, a thought would go through my head almost constantly: “there's never gonna be a room someplace where there's a group of people sitting around, having fun, hanging out, where one of them goes, 'you know what would be great? we should call fiona. yeah, that would be good.' that'll never happen. there's nothing interesting about me.”'
it shouldn’t be a surprise that someone i look up to so fervently had a similar childhood experience to me. and in the last few years i’ve seen countless people speak about how much this quote means to them, how it makes them feel seen. my experience was not original in the slightest. logically i’ve always known that none of my feelings are unique to me. i do not own them, nor can i claim to be the person who feels them in the most important way. most of the time, though, what i know to be true on an intellectual level stands in direct contrast to what i feel. nevertheless, it helps to know that fiona apple also felt this particular brand of psychic pain. she channelled it into her writing and in doing so forged a group of people who understood her, just like she’d always wanted.
since i’ve started writing on substack, my audience has begun to feel like a smaller, more shy version of the ‘free fiona’ mob that rallied around her in the early 2000s. every time i reach a new subscriber milestone or read a thoughtful comment that’s better written than the essay it’s responding to, i feel amazed that anyone is bothering to listen to me in the first place. i feel as though i have cheated somehow, and that i don’t deserve it. but if i didn’t deserve it, no one would be reading my work.
i’ve never felt as hopeful about my writing as i do when i’m interacting with strangers on substack, but it doesn’t always translate into real world self-esteem. a lot of beautiful and interesting people love me, which makes me feel at least beautiful-adjacent. so why am i so insatiable? why, now that i do have friends, do i sometimes wake up feeling more alone than ever? why do i never believe that the good in my life is capable of lasting?
when i was thirteen (it’s always at thirteen) i met a girl who was everything i wanted to be. she was tall and thin and waify and beautiful. she was the only person in my class who got better grades than me. we loved and hated all the same things. so i clung to her. i binged on our friendship, following her around like a bodyguard with braces and a death note messenger bag. sometimes she’d dump me out of nowhere, and i’d agonise over why she didn’t love me anymore. i’d bake chocolate chip cookies and offer them to her as an apology for any unkown transgressions. it was volatile, of course, and it all came crashing down two years later, but i’ll tell the full story another time.
what i will say is that every time i return to my hometown, walking past the girls in their school blazers and patent leather shoes, girls who have just reached that age, i want to scream. i want to check their wrists and thighs, i want to check their diaries, i want them to know what kind of cruelties might be inflicted upon them, especially if they’re desperate for a friend. i want to tell them that real friends don’t sting like that. but of course, they wouldn’t believe me if i did. and so the cycle repeats itself.
at twenty-two, i still occasionally binge on people like i did at thirteen. we meet once and i decide we are destined for lifelong friendship. i text them every day - if not real messages, countless instagram reels and memes that i think they’ll find funny. i spam my close friends story in the hope that they’ll reply. if i can only win their love, cement them in my life as more than a passing acquaintance, everything will be okay. and this goes on for so long until they decide i am either:
a) funny and interesting and someone they should care about, or
b) the weird, annoying little girl on the playground who won’t stop talking about the police procedural bones.
it has been tempting at times to reject community altogether, resign myself to a life alone so that i don’t risk humiliating myself again, but to paraphrase this essay by rayne fisher-quann, my relationships should not be viewed as a reward for becoming the most complete or healed or perfect version of myself. i’ve noted this a lot in the dating world recently: people seem to think one bad experience means they should swear off the idea of love forever, or never commit to anyone for fear of hurting or being hurt. i find this deeply concerning. our range of emotion is part of what makes us human, and it’s deeply depressing that so many people want to reject that wealth of feeling because it risks inconveniencing them.
one day i will feel secure enough in myself to know that just because my friends and i don’t speak every day, it doesn’t mean they don’t love me. maybe on my twenty-third birthday, or my twenty-fifth, or my thirtieth, i will think nothing of the years past, and wake up with only warmth and gratitude. or perhaps i will acknowledge all that i missed out on in an adolescence which felt more like adulthood in miniature than any sort of youthful freedom.
until then, i just have to remember that even if i was bad at being a child, i’m going to make a really good adult.
thank you for reading this essay! i don’t have much to add to this post, but here’s a song i’ve been listening to a lot lately:
until next time,
love, riley
the funny thing about loniless is you would think that having a sibling to be really close to would solve it but I have a twin who I am very close to but the loniless is still there the need for someone to be close to who isn't family is there and for me it results in me fantasizing about the potential friendships and romantic relationships I could have what it would feel like to have someone who hasn't know me since birth to be that close to me
Was looking for something relatable here and a single tear fell as I reached the end I realized you have the same name as mine. Thank you.