You probably don’t hate people, you just don’t want them in your general vicinity right now. You’re tired, you’re fed up, you feel as if you can barely trust a single soul on the planet. You’ve been shown so many times how horrendous the human race can be, and you just want to be left alone.

Except now you feel lonely.

You wanted solitude, not loneliness.

Now you’re stuck between hating the idea of being social and also being sad that no one is around. Someone asks you out for a drink or shows interest and you recoil at the concept, envisioning yet more heartache. Still, you find yourself annoyed at the fact you’re single.

It is a conflicting existence and that makes it all the more stressful.

You need to know what happiness is to you, rather than just contentedness. You need to know what the company of others means to you, rather than just what it means to not be alone anymore.

If you’re reading this and nodding your head, it probably means you don’t know how to be happy alone. You only know how to be content. You can be fiercely dependent at times to an unhealthy extent. Your friends are there to support you, but they’re not a replacement for loneliness. When they become an essential step in your healing, you lose the ability to heal yourself. You start to get scared that they’ll leave you, as others have done in the past. You get scared that if they do leave, you’ll have nothing left and no way to cope. You start constantly checking that they still love you.

They can tell you they love you as much as they like and you will still be scared.

That’s because you’re sensitive. You’re emotional and you hold a lot of care in your heart. None of those things are bad. But without knowing the difference between ‘happiness’ and ‘contentedness’, they can be toxic.

Okay, great, so that’s the issue you already knew you had. Thanks for that, Liam. Now, what’s the solution?

Well, do you actually know what you love? Do you actually know what makes you happy and not just content?

And for reference, here are my unofficial definitions of what ‘Content’ and ‘Happy’ mean:

Content: The state of being okay with the general situation you’re in, and happy enough to settle with it, but feeling as if something is missing or grey.

Happy: The consistent state of feeling a pleasant, sunny disposition. More than just okay with life as it currently stands in that moment.

Imagine you’re a super smart, super attractive person. You probably already are, but if you’re reading this, you probably also don’t believe it that much. But imagine it, and then imagine you want to date that person. You want to know everything about this desirable diamond of a human. You want to find out anything you can in order to wow them into loving you. Think about the questions you’d ask them and ask yourself:

What do you enjoy doing?

Where do you like being? And where would you go if you had the money?

What do you like to do with your friends?

What makes you happy?

Answer those questions and you’ll gradually start to understand who you are, what you like to do and why you hate being alone.

More often than not, if you feel lonely, there’s a chance you don’t know yourself well enough to be able to enjoy your own company, let alone others’. You don’t have to work out your whole life story, just the simple things.

Find out what makes you happy in life and fight for it at every occasion. You’ll feel lighter and you’ll have more patience. You’ll have more time for everyone else and will understand how to be alone.

As Lord Byron put it, “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone.”

So go find your infinity and be happy.