Together but Alone
Thoughts on 2020's Loneliness
by Kitty Muir
On 31st December 2019, like almost everyone else, I was drunk, happy, and telling the encroaching midnight that it would bring "my year" with its chimes. I was in a hopeful, unwitting bubble, fizzing like the prosecco I drank, feeling connected to the entire world via the news montage of the fireworks igniting the skies over cities I have never seen and people I will never meet. In a year characterised by loneliness, this would be the first - and, paradoxically, last - time I would feel this connection.
Looking back with a cynical eye, my optimism for the year ahead smacks of naivety. But how could any of us have known? We headed into the new decade together in a golden roar of coordinated celebration, and yet within months the phrase "we're all in this together" would become saccharine. Trapped in our homes, separated from family and friends and colleagues by a network of screens, what sense of unity was there? What did this sentiment mean when the concept of togetherness became a foreign entity to our everyday lives?
The sense of fleeting global community usually reserved for New Years' Eves and the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics returned in Covid-times, though warped beyond recognition. We seemed bound solely by our shared loneliness, by the inherent misery isolation inflicted on the most primal part of our brains. This spark of our ancient selves, which longed for community and the safety of a group, was starved to near extinction. Divided across rifts forged by political, social and viral forces, it felt as though we could universally relate solely to negative emotions. Perhaps this is why we felt so drained as time wore on; as humans we are all empaths to some degree, and feeding on nothing but the recycled loneliness, exhaustion, grief and frustration of our loved ones began to poison the well.
In some ways, I was lucky. I was locked down with family, while my friends and I forced ourselves to convene in zoom calls every week for quizzes, films and catch-ups. Slowly, I became accustomed to seeing my fatigue mirrored in their eyes and those of my zoom-self; to seeing a group usually huddled together in one photograph neatly cordoned into little boxes that glowed as we spoke. I became aware of how I craved the smallest things - a touch, a hug, the sight of a smile without a mask hiding it, and how in this longing I was as connected to the rest of the world as I had felt on New Year's Eve.
December 31st 2020 gave no reprieve. The loneliness that epitomised in 2020 is, in a twisted way, the most unifying side-effect of Covid-19. Somehow, it impacted both the extraordinary (the macro, the global, the communal whole; politics and international diplomacy and economy and the faceless mass of the general population) and the ordinary (the individual, sat in a lonely corner of the world, striving to merely exist). There are no answers, only the certainty that even in our loneliest moments, we are united.