Um, how loneliness came into my life… I, having signed up a couple of days ago to do this interview with you I started thinking about that, and thought back really to childhood, where I was raised by two parents who definitely cared about me but weren’t necessarily equipped with particularly useful parenting skills. As a result of which I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of emotional and physical abuse in an age where things which now would be picked up on and called abuse were just allowed to pass. That was just accepted. And I certainly had one uncle who turned around years later when I was very grown up and having a conversation with him about my childhood and said, “Oh, yes, we always looked at the way you were being raised and thought this will bring trouble.” But nobody intervened at the time. Nobody said anything at the time. People very much got on with their own lives and didn’t say anything to other people, apparently. And I was also always told when I was growing up that you didn’t share your troubles with anybody else because that only stopped them liking you. You must keep it to yourself.

It took years for me to realise that I actually felt annihilated in his presence. I was so unacknowledged, um, that I almost felt like there was nobody reflecting me back and my grasp on my own existence was tenuous. Um and yeah, I…I realised when I was very much an adult, um, that just being in his presence was enough to make me feel suicidal because I felt so unacknowledged, like somebody had rendered me invisible.

My daughter is now 26, um, so I live entirely on my own except for a dog and a cat, for whom I am extremely grateful under present circumstances. I’d also say that having a dog or a cat is a darn sight better than having nothing at all, and if you can’t afford either of those a house plant is good, something that needs you to look after it.

Um, how loneliness came into my life… I, having signed up a couple of days ago to do this interview with you I started thinking about that, and thought back really to childhood, where I was raised by two parents who definitely cared about me but weren’t necessarily equipped with particularly useful parenting skills. As a result of which I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of emotional and physical abuse in an age where things which now would be picked up on and called abuse were just allowed to pass. That was just accepted. And I certainly had one uncle who turned around years later when I was very grown up and having a conversation with him about my childhood and said, “Oh, yes, we always looked at the way you were being raised and thought this will bring trouble.” But nobody intervened at the time. Nobody said anything at the time. People very much got on with their own lives and didn’t say anything to other people, apparently. And I was also always told when I was growing up that you didn’t share your troubles with anybody else because that only stopped them liking you. You must keep it to yourself.

It took years for me to realise that I actually felt annihilated in his presence. I was so unacknowledged, that I almost felt like there was nobody reflecting me back and my grasp on my own existence was tenuous. And yeah, I…I realised when I was very much an adult, um, that just being in his presence was enough to make me feel suicidal because I felt so unacknowledged, like somebody had rendered me invisible.

I have been so completely thrown back on my own resources of late that I’ve almost lost a sense of what other people are for. That might sound a bit peculiar but I’ve begun to recognise that when I have the opportunity to socialise it’s almost as though I’ve turned in so much on myself, that it’s becoming hard to turn outwards and meet other people again. Um, yeah, and I don’t fully understand what’s happening there, it’s just something that I’ve been observing in myself.