There are more than eight billion people living on this planet.
Eight billion!
So, statistically speaking, whatever you are going through right now, however strange, complicated, frightening, embarrassing or impossible to explain it may feel, the chances that you are the only person on Earth experiencing something like it must be pretty slim, right!
And yet, when we are in the middle of something difficult, that is exactly how it can feel.
Nobody else has a family like mine… Nobody else’s mind does this… Nobody else has these symptoms… Nobody else is panicking about money. Nobody else went through what I went through. Nobody else is grieving like this… Nobody else is as scared as I am.
.. Nobody else could possibly understand.
Logically, it doesn’t make much sense. It’s impossible that we are the only ones to feel what we feel. But when we’re in the thick of it, it can feel overwhelmingly lonely.
Let me tell you, somewhere amongst those eight billion people, somebody has almost certainly sat awake at three o’clock in the morning thinking about something very similar to whatever is keeping your mind in overdrive.
Probably quite a lot of somebodies.
The difficulty is finding them.
Strangely, we happen to be living in probably the easiest time in human history in which to do exactly that.
We have the internet.
Yes, I know. The Internet 🙄
The very thing we are constantly being told to put down.
And quite rightly too.
We know what endlessly scrolling through other people’s holidays, houses, bodies, relationships, breakfasts, achievements and suspiciously poreless faces can do to us.
We know photographs are filtered, lives are edited, and somebody looking deliriously happy beside an infinity pool may have been crying ten minutes before the photograph was taken.
So yes, put the phone down sometimes.
Go outside. Look at a tree. Talk to an actual human being.
But before we blame the internet for absolutely everything that has gone wrong with modern civilisation, perhaps we should remember what an extraordinary tool it can be too.
What if, instead of using it mainly to find people whose lives seem better than ours, we occasionally used it to find people who understand ours?
One of my favourite YouTube channels is Special Books by Special Kids, or SBSK. It gives people living with all sorts of disabilities, neurological differences, mental-health conditions and very rare diagnoses an opportunity simply to tell us about their lives.
Some of the conditions featured are so rare that most of us will never have heard of them.
And yet, the more I watch, the less unusual everybody seems.
The diagnosis may be rare. The person isn’t.
They want friends. They want to be understood. They want independence. They want somebody to stop staring at them. They want to laugh and fall in love and be included and not have everybody assume that because they communicate differently, they don’t understand what is going on around them.
They want to be seen as a person before they are seen as a condition.
Which, when you think about it, is not particularly unusual at all.
That is what I love about the channel. It reminds me how extraordinarily different our lives can appear on the outside whilst underneath it all we are often asking for very similar things.
Please see me.
Please understand me.
Please don’t make me feel so alone.
Another channel I think is genuinely worth knowing about is Living Well After Schizophrenia, by Lauren Kennedy West.
Lauren speaks very openly about her own experience of schizoaffective disorder, including the difficult parts, the symptoms and the practical ways she manages her mental health. She doesn’t make it frightening, and she doesn’t pretend it isn’t there either. She talks about it with a kind of maturity and matter-of-factness that I find very reassuring. Her channel also points people towards peer support with others who understand what living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder can actually feel like.
I think this is especially important with diagnoses that still carry so much fear and misunderstanding.
There is something very different about hearing somebody describe an illness from inside the experience rather than only hearing somebody else explain it clinically.
Of course we need doctors and specialists. I am certainly not suggesting we replace psychiatrists with YouTube, which would probably end badly for everybody.
But there is enormous comfort in finding somebody who can say, in effect: this is part of my life, I recognise it, I get help for it, I have learned ways of managing it, and I am still here living my best life.
That is a very different message from denial, shame or hopelessness.
There are communities such as HealthUnlocked and The Mighty, where people connect around physical health, mental health, disability, caregiving and all sorts of other life experiences. 7 Cups connects people who simply need somebody to listen with trained volunteer listeners and online communities.
You don’t even have to join anything.
Sometimes you can simply read a paragraph or watch a video.
Perhaps you aren’t ready to introduce yourself to a group of strangers. Perhaps you don’t want to tell anybody your name. Perhaps you have spent quite enough of the day talking and would actually rather nobody asked you another question.
You can still sit quietly with a cuppa and find somebody on the other side of the world describing the very thing you have been unable to explain to the people sitting in the same house as you.
And you think,
Oh. It’s not just me.
Sometimes that is enough.
And this isn’t only about illness.
It may be grief, infertility, divorce, addiction, caring for an elderly parent, parenting a child who is struggling, loneliness after retirement, losing a business, being made redundant or finding yourself frightened every time you open your banking app.
Money worries can be especially isolating because people often feel ashamed of them.
We can happily tell somebody that our knee is playing up, yet admitting that we are struggling to pay the electricity bill can feel like revealing some terrible moral failing.
Sometimes finding your tribe begins with finding one person in front of whom you don’t have to pretend everything is fine.
And your tribe doesn’t necessarily have to look anything like you.
They don’t have to come from your country, share your religion, be your age or have exactly the same circumstances.
You can watch somebody whose life appears to have absolutely nothing in common with yours and then they say one sentence which goes straight through you:
Oh my goodness. Me too.
Sometimes we find our people through what we love rather than through what is hurting us.
I think of Love Om and his iLoveOS YouTube channel too. For people drawn to Om Swami ji and his teachings, it has become another little corner of this enormous internet where people living in completely different countries and circumstances can gather around something meaningful to them.
Our tribes don’t always have to form around our problems.
Thank goodness.
Otherwise every friendship would begin with everyone sitting in a circle introducing themselves by catastrophe.
Sometimes we find each other through what inspires us. Through faith, books, music, volunteering, meditation, gardening, running, cooking, a particular teacher, or a slightly obsessive interest that nobody else in the household wants to hear about anymore.
These connections matter too.
In spiritual communities we often use the word sangha — a community of fellow travellers.
People walking some part of the road alongside us.
I think most of us need some form of sangha, whether or not we would ever call it that.
And perhaps we need several.
The people who understand your spiritual life may know nothing about your family situation. Someone who understands your illness may know nothing about the financial worry that is keeping you awake. Your oldest friend may adore you but have absolutely no idea what it is like to care for somebody with dementia. Someone you have never met in another country may understand it immediately.
No single person has to understand every part of us.
Sometimes loneliness doesn’t mean that nobody loves us.
Sometimes the people who love us simply cannot understand one particular part of what we are living through.
They may try. They may be wonderfully kind.
But there is a difference between someone saying, “That sounds really difficult,” and somebody saying, “I know.”
Those are only two little words.
But when you have spent days, weeks, months or years, thinking nobody knows, they can feel enormous.
Of course, we still need some discernment.
Not every online community is healthy simply because everybody there has the same problem.
Some groups help us to feel understood and then help us move forward. Others can become echo chambers where fear, anger or hopelessness simply bounce around between everybody.
I don’t think finding your tribe means finding people who agree with everything you think.
A good community should help you feel less alone without making the difficulty the whole of your identity.
And please be sensible. Protect your privacy. Be particularly careful with medical and financial advice. Somebody else’s experience is not your diagnosis, and a confident person on the internet is not necessarily a qualified person on the internet. The two are very easily confused.
If loneliness or distress has reached the point where somebody feels unsafe or suicidal, online companionship is also not a replacement for proper help. Find A Helpline is one useful international resource which connects people in many countries with local emotional-support and crisis services.
But we don’t have to wait until things become a crisis before reaching out.
Perhaps that is the part I keep coming back to.
Why do we wait until we are drowning before admitting that we would quite like somebody else in the water with us?
Sometimes just knowing that another person has been through something and come out the other side changes what feels possible.
The newly diagnosed person finds somebody who has been living well with the condition for ten years.
The man who has lost his job hears from somebody who remembers exactly what that first frightening Monday morning felt like.
The exhausted carer discovers that other people have also occasionally hidden in the bathroom for five minutes simply because nobody can ask them for anything in there.
The grieving person realises that another human being understands why six months later they are still crying over something apparently ridiculous in the supermarket.
Perhaps they aren’t ridiculous things at all.
Perhaps they are simply human things.
And if you happen to be living with something that makes you feel as though nobody could possibly understand what is happening inside your mind, perhaps start with one page, one video.
You don’t have to tell anybody.
You don’t have to join a group.
You don’t even have to agree with everything.
Just listen to somebody who knows the territory.
Sometimes discovering that another person has walked through a landscape you thought belonged only to you can make it feel a little less frightening.
And if you happen to be the person who has already walked through the thing somebody else is only just entering, perhaps turn around occasionally.
You don’t need thousands of followers. You don’t need to become an advocate or tell the whole world your story.
Sometimes one honest conversation with one frightened person is enough.
And not every tribe needs to last forever either.
Some people walk beside us for years.
Some appear for one particular stretch of road, give us exactly what we needed at the time, and then life moves us in different directions.
That doesn’t make the connection any less real.
Perhaps finding your tribe isn’t about finding one perfect group of people who will understand everything about you forever.
Perhaps it is simply finding those little places in this enormous world where, for a while, you don’t have to explain quite so much.
Remember, there are more than eight billion of us here. Whatever you are going through, you really aren’t the only one.
You never have to feel misunderstood or alone on your journey.
Go find your tribe! 🧡