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Loneliness

Mental Health

5 March 2024

5 min read

What Bobby Brazier, Jo Marsh and Eleanor Rigby have in common

A public health campaign asks influencers if they are lonely.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

a young man looks pensive as he answers a questuon while sitting in a fancy room.

Bobby Brazier at 10 Downing Street.

NHS.

‘Loneliness. It’s a part of life. Let’s talk about it’

That’s the new slogan offered by the NHS in partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. As part of their campaign, they recently invited young influencers and TV personalities to Downing Street to do just that – to talk about loneliness.

With those aged between 16 and 29 now twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over 70, these celebrities were tasked with answering a few of the questions most asked by people within that age group. Their questions went along these heart-wrenching lines:

Why am I so lonely?

Is it normal to feel lonely?

Will I always be this lonely?

And while their answers to such questions were a little ‘meh’ (whose wouldn’t be? They were given seven seconds to answer some of humanity’s deepest questions), it doesn’t much matter, their answers weren’t really the point. Rather, viewers were presented with a handful of popular, successful, lovable (looking at you, Bobby Brazier) and happy looking people doing something notoriously difficult: admitting loneliness.

And I think that may be the point.

I am of the firm opinion that admitting to feeling lonely is one of the hardest things a person could do. I have certainly never had the bravery to do it.

I remember watching Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of the beloved 1868 novel, Little Women, for the first time; I was always going to love it, I had decided as much before even stepping foot in the cinema. But there was one scene that felt as if it literally took my breath away. I was left winded in row C.

It is toward the end of the film, and Jo Marsh, the feisty, strong and independent protagonist, is giving a feminist monologue for the ages (albeit to her mum) as she stands in the attic of her childhood home. Jo speaks of women’s minds and souls, their ambitions and talents, she explains how sick she is of being underestimated, getting more impassioned with every word. That is, until she tearily ends her speech by declaring – ‘…but I’m so lonely.’

This isn’t in the book.

This final line was written by Greta Gerwig specifically for this adaptation. And the only person who seemed to be more taken aback by Jo’s words than me (an owner of more editions of the novel than is cool to admit), was Jo herself, who instinctively clasped her hand to her mouth as if she couldn’t believe that she’d just said such words aloud.

As far as filmmaking goes, it was genius. As far as human nature is concerned, it was, well, true.

Not only do we find loneliness acutely painful, but we also tend to find it near impossible to admit to, so much so, the government currently feels the need to step in. Why is that, I wonder? Why does ‘lonely’ seem to be the hardest word?

Those who admit to their own loneliness are wading into profoundly vulnerable waters.

Part of it is certainly because there is a social stigma attached to feeling lonely. Ironic, isn’t it? How loneliness has social connotations. Nobody wants to be Eleanor Rigby, nor Father McKenzie, nor any of ‘the lonely people’ that Paul McCartney so pities, for that matter. It’s one of the only Beatles songs you wouldn’t want to have been written about you. Loneliness feels like a failure somehow, and so we struggle to admit it, even to ourselves. A failure because, we’re supposed to be self-sufficient, independent, free-thinking, emotionally-sturdy individuals (which is the operative word, of course). That’s what individualism has taught us, isn’t it? And so, how do we reconcile that with the piercing pain of isolation? How do we admit that there’s a deep crack within us that can’t be papered over by success, or wealth, or another episode of our favourite podcast? How do we go about admitting such a lack? A lack, which despite individualism’s best efforts, has us naturally wondering why it’s there in the first place; are we unpopular? Unattractive? Unlikable? Or worst of all, unlovable?

Those who admit to their own loneliness are wading into profoundly vulnerable waters. And most of us are utterly unwilling to follow them there, lest we be spotted by a budding Paul McCartney and our loneliness be immortalised.

And then, of course, there’s the other side of the coin: what does our loneliness say about the people who we are in relationship with? Nobody wants to unleash the panic and guilt tucked away in that can of worms (which, I must note, is unnecessary panic and guilt - there could be any number of reasons you’re feeling lonely, despite your very rich relationships).

And so, we just don’t say the word. And that’s what appears to be making the NHS and, rather randomly now that I think about it, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport so nervous.

We need to admit when we’re lonely. We have to pull a Jo Marsh and say it out loud. We must give language to the lack that we feel.

To be known and loved is my deepest and truest need.

One of the things that I find myself most consistently thankful for when it comes to my Christian faith (you know, apart from the most obvious aspects…) is that it gives me such language. At the risk of sounding annoyingly self-centred, it dignifies the feelings that I find hard to even acknowledge. It offers explanation, and therefore, a comfort that I could never find anywhere else; a comfort rooted in truth.

It may sound nuts, but I have come to understand the reality of loneliness, not through influencers on a sofa in Downing Street (although that’s great), and not even through Jo Marsh’s monologue (which is even greater), but through an ancient Hebrew poem. This poem tells me that to be alone is ‘not good’.

Not good. Not right. Not as it should be.

That’s God’s point of view at least – that to be alone, properly, completely and permanently alone, goes against the very fabric of the world. It is at odds with human flourishing. I’ve come to deeply value how concrete that is. I’ve also learnt to relax into the knowledge that not only is loneliness ‘normal’ (referring to one to the questions referenced at the beginning), it’s natural, in every possible sense of the word.

To be known and loved is my deepest and truest need. I was designed for relationship, with God and with people. And therefore – with all the complex ways that life unfolds - to be lonely, is to be human.

So, with all of this in mind, I’m tempted to end where we began, to come full circle and once again borrow the government’s words:

‘Loneliness. It’s a part of life. Let’s talk about it.’

Column

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Faith

15 August 2024

4 min read

Faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing

Sarah Perry’s comments suggest a reawakening of concern for its observation.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A woman being interviewed gestures with a hand in front of her

Sarah Perry.

Waterstones.

If there’s one thing anyone who has ever written a novel can’t stand, it’s having to congratulate a successful novelist. So, it’s through gritted teeth that I warmly welcome the words of Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent) that religious faith is ceasing to be a subject of embarrassment in published fiction.

It’s about time. Perry told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that, for her latest book Enlightenment, she was asked to put in more theology: “I assumed that everybody knew what the doctrine of predestination meant.” Bless.

The cause of my pathetic envy as I applaud her is that I had my first (and, to date, only) novel published in 2017, to almost universal disinterest. I like to tell people that it was well received – all three people who actually read it said they enjoyed it and only one of them was a family member. It actually did a bit better than that, but you get my drift.

It was an unashamedly religious psychological thriller, titled A Dark Nativity. Brace position, here comes a one-sentence synopsis: The narrator, Reverend Natalie Cross, is a frustrated former aid worker who undertakes a mission to Israel, is kidnapped and held hostage, murders her way to freedom, discovers she was the victim of an Anglo-American plot, wreaks her terrible revenge and (spoiler alert!) gives birth to a son of uncertain paternity.

See what I did there? As well as the latter-day Nativity resonance, thematically I was interested in what redemption looks like in Israel and Palestine. I know, I know – but even I thought it would be distasteful to try to cash in on what’s happened there since.

Enough of the plug for a seven-year-old novel. My point is that its religious themes actively militated against it at the time. Novels addressing Christian faith (or any other kind) occupied a particular publishing niche – a harsher word might be ghetto. To try to break out of it was pointless. The great Christian novelist Penelope Wilcock told me (very kindly) that my book was too religious for the secular market and too secular for religious readers.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation.

The restricted area to which religion was confined had its stylistic rules. There was the cathedral close romp, which authors such as Catherine Fox had made their own. The vicarly whodunnit (lately updated by Reverend Richard Coles). Magic realism with its daemons and Philip Pullmans. And anything, in the wake of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, involving ancient plots that might make a movie, with hooded figures walking in slo-mo through cloisters.

Vicars had to be evil or silly. I may be both those things at times, but I’d like to think there is other stuff going on here for cultural exploration. My narrator, Nat Cross, was driven, often funny and more than a little mad. So like a lot of Anglican clergy.

If she’s right – and I very much hope she is – it’s why what Perry has to say is so hopeful. Because it begins to suggest that religious faith is slowly beginning to be accepted back into polite society. Whisper it softly, it might even become a cultural norm. If Richard Dawkins can describe himself as a “cultural Christian” and the historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, can claim that Christianity is the entire foundation of western civilisation, then there is everything to play for. And, indeed, write for.

It’s not as if cathedral frolics and the revelation of Jesus’s wife in Leonardo’s Last Supper was anything other than a fictional diversion of post-modernism. Religion and specifically Christianity had been a staple of the novel in English.

I hesitate to mention their names in the same column as the authors above (including me, most obviously), but Graham Greene’s exposition of Catholic guilt in The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s of the impossibility of moral reformation in Brideshead Revisited are probably the best religious novels of the twentieth century.

Further back towards the birth of the English novel, the Reverend Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is perhaps the most tragic portrait of a clergyman who is neither evil nor silly. He stand as a warning from history to today’s Church of England.

And it’s to that, the established Church, that Perry’s remarks ultimately turn our attention. We’re told that there has been a five per cent spike in church attendance recently, but that of itself isn’t sufficient to suggest a renaissance in our religious culture. Our arts and culture will only ever really reflect what we care about.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation. If so, that’s good news for the religious, as well as for religious authors. And I might just get a sequel out of it.