Substacks are going to kill me.

I’m a Word Girl, and so videos on Tik-Tok and Instagram and YouTube don’t claim too much of my attention. Keep your reels: give me words.

And then Substack came into being, and there are so many interesting people over there saying so many interesting things that I can get quite lost in it, and forget that I have a book to write.

I’m solitary by nature, and am happiest when I’m in my own space, reading or writing or just puttering around, and maybe I haven’t given much thought to this “crisis” because it doesn’t affect me. My favorite place in the whole world is at my desk.

Plus, I live in a community that doesn’t allow me to spend all my time alone. Friends out here at Land’s End tend to take friendships seriously (we have to: we depend on each other for so many things, especially in the winter). I am a theatre critic, and so perforce have to actually go and see plays. I present a radio show and need to spend time in conversation with a lot of interesting people. I attend a monthly poetry workshop in person and a daily writing accountability group via Zoom.

But at least until recently, with the exception of a few sacred subscriptions (The Marginalian comes to mind), I was able to sit at my computer and just write. Not anymore! I read Substack messages about the writing process/practice, about living my faith seriously in a time when it’s been usurped by non-serious political actors, about exploring the darker side of our natures. I read essays written by psychologists, by feminists, by writers. And I love all of it.

Which brings me back to loneliness. Loneliness is more than just isolation: it’s the subjective experience of craving more social interaction than you currently have. It isn’t binary, either, and no one is immune. I get that. And I get that I have a higher tolerance for not having a lot of people around me most of the time than do others.

But I also remember someone asking me, shortly after I moved to my small community on the tip of Cape Cod, “aren’t you lonely?”

My response—absolutely without thinking about it—was, “No, I have books.”

Because here in my tiny cottage I am accompanied (and sometimes overwhelmed) by voices. Every novel on the shelf or in my e-reader brings me into others’ lives, deep into their struggles and triumphs. Sometimes even into their deaths. I read of lives lived on the other side of the world or in a different century from mine. I read of births, marriages, careers, families.

Putting these stories down is always a challenge; I am the queen of “just one more chapter.” I feel I’m leaving friends, or acquaintances, or a whole community behind when I close the book. How on earth could I ever be lonely?

I’m not suggesting this works for everyone. I know there are people who need, really need, others’ presence physically in their lives. But for many of us, the sense of being left out, of not having important connections, of having friends who are always busy with everyone but us—to those people I say, read a book. Allow others’ stories to become part of your story.

Let words come to the rescue!

The Loneliness Crisis: Words to the Rescue

Enough is Enough