Loneliness is often portrayed in a very simple way.
An empty room. A chair beside a window. Someone looking outside while it rains.
It is an elegant image, almost cinematic.
Reality is usually far less photogenic.
Sometimes loneliness means having a modern, clean, quiet home, with everything that should make it comfortable, and still waking up every morning with the feeling that you are living in the wrong place.
On paper, my home works.
It has a bedroom, a modern kitchen, a lift, parking, and even a shared outdoor space. It is close to the station and the town centre. There are no noisy neighbours, late-night parties, or pipes performing a drum solo at three in the morning.
I should be happy.
“You should be happy” is one of the most useless things you can say to someone who is not.
Happiness is not an inventory.
It is not enough to count the rooms, check that everything works, and confirm that the supermarket is within walking distance.
A home can be perfectly adequate and, at the same time, entirely wrong for the person living in it.
When I moved here, it did not feel like a real choice.
It felt more like an emergency landing. I had reached somewhere safe, but it was not where I had been travelling.
At first, you believe you will get used to it.
You tell yourself the quiet will do you good. That you will have more space. That you can build a new routine, meet people, and begin again.
You buy a few pieces of furniture.
You move the sofa.
You place a lamp in the right corner.
You try to convince the room, and perhaps yourself, that this is now where you belong.
But a well-positioned lamp does not create belonging.
Over time, the house began to feel less like a refuge and more like a container.
The long corridors, the concrete, the identical doors, the buildings continuing to rise around it: all probably designed to be practical, modern, and efficient.
Yet when your mood drops, even architecture seems to take sides.
Concrete stops being a material and becomes a feeling.
The corridors seem longer.
The silence grows heavier.
The house does not physically keep me inside, of course. The door opens. The station is nearby. I can leave whenever I choose.
But feeling trapped does not always mean being unable to go anywhere.
Sometimes it means not knowing where to go.
The city where I lived for many years is not simply a point on a map to me.
It is where I built an important part of my life. It means movement, anonymity, and possibility. It means being able to leave the house without organising every outing like a polar expedition. It means knowing that, even when you are alone, life is still circulating around you.
Where I live now, I often feel that the day has to be invented from nothing.
When you have no appointment, no specific project, and nobody to meet, time expands. It becomes another room, and that room also has to be filled.
The problem is not the place itself.
It might be perfect for someone else.
The problem is the relationship between a person and the environment in which they live. Some places calm us. Others energise us. Others, without any cruelty at all, slowly switch us off.
It is difficult to explain this without sounding ungrateful.
Especially when you have a decent home and know that many people are living in far worse circumstances.
But pain is not a competition.
Someone else’s suffering does not automatically turn ours into wellbeing.
We can be grateful for what we have and, at the same time, recognise that it is not good for us.
Both things can be true.
I do not hate my home.
It might actually be easier if I did.
I could point to an obvious fault: a leak, mould, noise, something concrete that could be photographed and shown to someone.
Instead, the problem is more subtle.
This home does not match the life I still feel I am meant to live.
It is a good home for a version of me that does not exist.
Someone quieter, more domestic, less in need of people, stimulation, and movement. Someone who finds comfort in silence and does not begin to interpret it, after a few hours, as a personal remark.
I have tried to change my perspective.
I have tried to adapt.
I have walked, decorated, rearranged things, started projects, abandoned them, and then restarted the same projects under slightly different names, a fairly common practice among creative people and governments.
But adaptation has its limits.
Staying does not always mean being strong.
Sometimes it simply means becoming very good at enduring.
Wanting to live somewhere else is not, for me, a whim. It is not about finding a more fashionable neighbourhood or a prettier kitchen to photograph.
It is an attempt to return to an environment where my life has more chances to move.
I want to be able to meet people.
I want to feel connected to my history, my social circle, and the places I know.
I want to leave the house without feeling that the world is always slightly too far away.
A home should protect us, but it should not separate us from life.
It should be the place we leave from, not the place where we slowly disappear.
Loneliness is not always about being alone.
Sometimes it means finding yourself every day in a place that does not recognise you.
And continuing to call it home simply because that is where your bed happens to be.