How To Belong When You're Lonely

Using interpersonal values to create community in real life.

It’s 9 am on Thursday and all is quiet, bar the hum of the pedestal fan in the corner that reminds me summer will be hot this year. 

I find myself sinking into our dining room office with a relaxed sigh. I slide on reading glasses that help me feel like a writer who knows where to place her commas, even though I think the optometrist upsold me on a fake lens. 

Thursday is my work day and I find it intoxicatingly liberating because it’s the only time I get to focus on Just. One. Thing. 

I spend the day surrounded by empty tea cups and napkin-scrawled notes, feeling like Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give, laughing, crying and nodding as my fingers tap the keyboard, helping my brain make sense of my weekly curiosities. 

I write not to share thoughts but to understand them. I start these articles with an idea or question that’s been bumping around my brain for a few days and it’s in the writing answers present themselves. It’s not always seamless but it’s a process that works. 

And on Thursdays, I get to do it all day. 

As I begin today I notice a physical softening, as if my bones were yearning for this posture all week.

(They probably have been.)

Winter this year was not the season of fallow that I had been expecting. Life’s mechanics have felt like connecting a puzzle of endless blue ocean and wondering how the pieces fit together.

Endless blue often leads to an empty fruit basket and a dinner pulled from my magician’s briefcase of antipasto jars and pantry carbohydrates.

It leads to a lot of mental toggling. A lot of cape swapping, depending on what version of me needs to step up to the plate.

It means focusing on short-term essentials and hoping the full picture will fall into place in time. Is this the best way to go about it? I’m not sure. But it seems to quell panic and keep us afloat until we demote some of life’s busyness.

On the Mother Ship I’ve been spending time regulating tiny bodies exhausted from a busy season and trying to set the tone for a calm and creative home. Some days I’m better at this than others. 

You can likely relate.

In times like this I circle back to my values, holding them up like clandestine lanterns on a rocky coastline as I smuggle ashore space, boredom, quality time.

If we let them, our values keep us on track when shadows hide our path, and lead to unexpected avenues of adventure.

If we remember, our values give meaning to it all.

Foraging For Values

Last weekend — when we didn’t have “time” — we spent two hours up a mulberry tree staining t-shirts mauve and devouring sweet fruit until our sides were ready to split. A serendipitous encounter with a couple near the nature strip saw us sharing a bounty of freshly dropped macadamia nuts from their garden. We then pulled out the watercolours to paint a foraging map that will remind us where the season’s best produce can be found — the passionfruit over Frank’s fence, mango at the lagoon, Mick’s macadamias, dandelion weeds along the lane, homegrown lemons for 40cents on Lloyd St, bitter melon, spinach and ginger at Keng and Kin’s. 

This is a common reset for us. 

Acting on our values of nature time and adventure has allowed our family to spark unexpected friendships along fence lines, verges and creeks. From age three to 83, we’ve found ourselves welcomed into an intergenerational community of those who want to share what they grow and know, with moments of connection that far outweigh any berry bounty. 

As a family who have lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle over the past 12 years, these seeds of belonging count for a lot. We can point to their recurrence everywhere we’ve lived and tell you that within each community you can find a place to belong if you allow your values to work as a magnet that attracts like-minded-enough fellow humans. 

Note: Building a community strictly with people who match ALL your values, belief systems and genetic makeup creates an echo chamber of obnoxiousness and stunts growth for everyone. True community includes finding people who will argue WITH you and argue FOR you with equal fervour.

But belonging can become harder as we get older. 

We move, our families grow or shrink, our interests change, our circumstances update, and our online world outranks our in-person connections. 

For some of us, Belonging can be a value that we don’t know is missing because we exist with the appearance of it. A digital social life, enough acquaintances, and a busy schedule are all things that can trick us into thinking we’re connected when we’re honestly quite lonely. 

This was my experience after our most recent move and it took a long while to feel like I could belong. 

As someone with social anxiety I enjoy moving because I find that the easiest conversations are the ones you have when you’re new; I’m in my zone when I can razzle-dazzle with getting-to-know-you small talk but feel exposed and filled with self-doubt when relationships tick into semi-longterm territory. 

(The exception was meeting my friends who started with the hard chat and looped backwards to the weather. You know who you are! It’s much easier for me to talk about heartache and the meta crisis than what I did on Tuesday.)

We’re back in that liminal space right now, having spent close to three years in our most recent city, and I’m finding myself having to be brave enough to strengthen new bonds whilst trying to pull back on the self-deprecating-humour-as-social-armour tactic that I tend to deploy. 

So I’m leaning on my values to help build my social confidence — assuming that if I’m clear on who I am and what I think matters I’ll be putting forth the most authentic version of myself.

And all good friendships grow from authenticity. 

This is how it looks:

1. I’ve thought about the interpersonal values that I like about myself and have started using them as self-love statements. 

“I’m empathetic and I care about others.”

“I’m curious and open to changing my mind.”

“I value my friend’s stories, histories and realities.”

“I’m an observer and here to help.”

---

2. I’ve been thinking about how I want to show up in my community: how could I be in service in a way that feels most true for me? I’m currently unpacking this question in my personal writings and conversations with close friends. 

   In this process I’m guided by Romans 12:2:

   Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

   ---

3. Finally, I’m setting up my home in a way conducive to creating the types of relationships I want.

   The words that come to mind are calm, beautiful, hospitable, generous, relaxed. I use these words to guide me in my design choices and want to further deepen into a neighbourhood Open Door Policy. 

This is how I’m working to belong through my value system, just one of the many strands of Values-Based Living that we can draw on here in our chats.

I wonder what your thoughts are?

How do your values show up in your relationships, new or old?

Let me know below. 

Jenn
xx

P.S. If you missed last week’s Containers For Code exercise (to help you identify your Top 3 Core Values) you can find it here.