I realise that actually I was a very lonely child because of being a looked after young person and not having the ability to make friends. Because I didn’t know how, it wasn’t something that was natural to me because my childhood was spent dealing with my parents’ issues. So as whereas other children were naturally in school, making friends, building support groups, peer support groups, I didn’t have that because I was at home dealing with a, you know, drug addict mother and, you know, no father and so forth.

Yeah, so as a child, so it’s interesting, I have my social services record and I have all my old school reports and almost every report says that, you know, that I was a lonely child. I was often seen on my own in the playground. I would sit and read books instead of take part in group activities. I’m not very sporty, you know, I was evidentially gay as a very young child so it was another barrier, you know, for me making friends because, you know, it just was different and different is sometimes difficult for children.

But, you know, I think all of it goes back to the fact that my upbringing was chaotic, you know, my birth, birth mother, my birth father was never on the scene. My birth mother was heavily involved in drug use and alcohol use so, you know, sometimes she was really good as a parent and, you know, would do great things but then there’d be weeks where there wouldn’t even be food in the house and she’d be too, you know, out of it, either on drugs on alcohol to get up and, you know, take me, take me to school or make sure I got to school. So as a child I had to fend for myself. So whereas other children would be going to the park after school or, you know, to after school clubs, I was going home, if I was at school, I was going home and cooking food for my younger brother and cleaning and trying to make sure that she was still alive and dealing with, you know, very negative people coming in and out of the house, drug dealers etc.

So as a child, I would say that it wasn’t a childhood, it was a survival. It was very sort of neglectful, you know, bad, I use the word bad, but, you know, awful parenting where there was no protective factors. So without those initial protective factors as a child security blanket in a sense, you know, being cared for, the warmth, being fed, having a roof over your head, you know, that was always a constant risk, you know, we’d be homeless and we did become homeless at one point. Sort of without all those protective factors, I wasn’t able to do the other stuff so I wasn’t in school enough to build protective relationships with people.

So it was, it was years later when I looked back and I realised, with all the training I’ve now got as a professional, that actually I missed a lot of that development stage which other children [er], you know, have naturally. So, it’s, for me as someone who, you know, now lives on their own, I have friends, I have good support networks, but I often find that I don’t have that go to support network that other people will just have at a drop of a hat. You know, I’ve got friends I can call, I’ve got people that I can always get in touch with but I do often feel like I’m not as involved in friendship circle groups I would say, and as an adult, I recognise that, you know, I recognise the link to my childhood but I also recognise that’s something very difficult to change and, you know, I became very self-reliant and obviously that’s moved into adulthood and it’s a, a big effort for me to then go out and try and change that and I know the ways to change that but less so in lockdown to be honest, but, you know, the normal sort of things of joining groups and so forth but I don’t find that even if I do that, I don’t find that I naturally develop those relationships which is I find really interesting because everyone at work would describe me as very sociable person.

But I think all of that added to the labels, so I think labels are a big thing. You know, I was poor, I came from a very poor background. I was looked after as a child in care. My foster family were evidently not my family because they were black and, you know, I’m white, so it was very obvious to anyone who saw us on the street, “That’s not your mum, you know who is that?” and you’d go, “Okay, well I can’t lie that it’s, you know, my step mum or something, you know. Being gay, struggling with school because I’d missed so much school as a child, you know, when you go up to sort of secondary school, there are certain things that you’re meant to just know by that point……

Mm.

…because I’d not been at school.

…because you were a parent really weren’t you?

Yeah so it was a bit like a, you know, a set of hills, where, you know, some days I’d be really on top of what’s going on in the school, other days I was completely, you know, had no idea what was being taught because I’d just missed so much. Having social workers, you know, all of these different things that were kind of labels meant that even before I went into a room people would kind of know who I was. I was the only gay person in the school for many years [er] you know, it was a horrible time and in a sense I look back, you know, I had, the small number of friends I had at high school were bullied for being my friend, you know, and I had to, I remember saying to someone, you don’t have to sit with me because, you know, they used to get as bullied as much as I did and partly due to their religion, you know, they, two out of the three were Muslim and they used to get told by other Muslim people, “You can’t sit with him because he’s gay,” and all of this and it was hard for them. So, you know, add that for me as well, it was, it was, add that to what I was going through it was even more harder.

So I know this, I remember even at high school, you’re surrounded by people I would count as friends and some of them I still speak to now you know ad hocly but there was times I would very much feel I was the outsider or I was different from the group, partly because I was gay but also because I was brought up in care and, you know, I didn’t have what they had in terms of resources. So, you know, I lived in quite an affluent area and went to a school that wasn’t affluent, affluent but you know most of young people there, predominately they did okay, you know, family, so they would have mobile phones and they would have the latest, you know, trainers and hoodies and stuff like that and I always used to feel like I didn’t have that so I didn’t belong.

I think for me when my adopted mum and cat even died, I think because it was the end of a long journey, especially for my adopted mum it gave me a little bit of my life back where I wasn’t always worried about the next phone call. You know, I was able to sleep for the first time in, in eighteen months really because I wasn’t always alert for the phone call that she’s gone to hospital or this has happened [er] and I was able to, you know, have a bit of me back because I spent a lot of my time sitting with, you know, someone who was dying and it meant I wasn’t seeing people and I remember her saying to me, “Can you please leave me alone? Can you go out and see your friends because I’ll be gone and they, they will be too but they’ll still be living,” and so, so I think, you know, it’s, yeah it’s interesting one.

I’ve got, I would say a good set of work friends/colleagues, people I have lunch with, but I know that since lockdown it’s been very much more evident that they are just work colleagues. They’re not people that I would see outside of that unless we’re in the office and say going, you know, for a drink after work or going to a leaving do or something. Very much they are a work set. So whilst I do have friends, it’s often, I think some of it’s transactional. Like, my friends that are there because we’re all in the same boat but, you know, we don’t have deep meaningful relationships or they are surface level relationships where we know each other because we go to the same venue. So, there’s a bar that I used to go to in town after work and we just, there was a group of people that I would hang out with but I wouldn’t call them friends. I would, you know, out of all of them, out of about fifteen people I’d say maybe there was one friend, you know. They’re not people I would call up and see unless we happened to be in the same venue. So now that we’ve gone into well lockdown two, it kind of, just it’s even more evident now that it’s, there’s a gap.

Even more so now with Covid, you know, you’re not allowed to see other people but see do go out for a walk and, you know, exercise but I think the mental health aspect of the lockdown and that’s the whole broad spectrum including the, I think even more so now people are going to recognise loneliness for themselves. I mean I have more so during lockdown one and the start of this one. [er] People are going to start recognising this a lot more. I think the consequences of that and the consequences on the nations’ mental health are only just about to be noticed and really recognised [er] but they’re going to be long standing and I think people are, you know, there’s lots of people who are re-evaluating their lives right now, who are looking at leaving cities and moving to the country side or, you know, changing jobs because actually, ‘Do you know what, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to commute. I don’t want to do x, y and z.’ But there’s also a lot of people out there who are going to suddenly realise or have realised that they’re very much on their own and they don’t have big support networks that they thought they had, that have instantly disappeared because they’re no longer in the office every day.

I mean it’s great in the sense of I’ve got friends who live in America and contacts and so forth and it’s amazing, you know, I get to see their life. I’ve got family, you know, who I’m a estranged from that I have been able to reconnect to. You know, a couple of years ago, I found a cousin by chance, you know, recognise the name. I dropped, you know, a message on Facebook, you know, “Are you related to x, y and z? and she was like, ‘Yes, I am, who are you?’

I think it’s, I think it’s stigmatised. I think it’s because to admit that you’re lonely is admitting that you are weak in a certain area…

Mm.

….and I think for me personally it took a long time to admit to myself that I felt loneliness [er] and actually, although loneliness is normal, it’s something that we all experience in times in our life and is a natural thing to experience, I think there were times that I didn’t want to admit that I was lonely because I felt like I was just being sad and being a bit pathetic but actually I shouldn’t have been. What I should have done is be able to admit, ‘Yes, I’m feeling lonely. Yes, I need to do x, y, z.’ But, you know, I didn’t feel and it’s only recent a small selective group of people that I possibly could phone up and say, “Do you know I’m feeling really alone now. I’m feeling lonely, I feel like I need some interaction whether that’s in person or over the phone.”

But I do recognise that there isn’t a lot out there, I mean there’s a lot out there for people who are experiencing suicidal thoughts for example, which could be linked from being lonely etc, not having support networks. I think there’s a lot of helplines out there, but I don’t, and there’s befriending services for certain groups. You know, if you’re older, if you’re, you know, a young person who is new to the area. If you’re an asylum seeker, those things but I don’t think there is or maybe it’s not so socially accepted to be mid-thirties and accept and admit that you’re lonely or you’re struggling.

You know, I know that there’s lots of changes now in how we view men for example, and men accessing support services and recognising that actually, we’ve always known that men don’t access health services for example and there’s lots more recognition to that but it, there isn’t stuff that just talks about actually it’s okay to say that you’re lonely.

I also think weirdly when I say this but it’s something I did notice, so I had a cat for year and then she died and then during the first lockdown I got adopted this cat which and I think just having another being in the household when you live on your own, you know, having just cats, it changed things for me. I felt a lot more happy in that sense. Although she drives me insane, scratching the furniture and the carpets but just having that creature in the house, although she’s very vocal but we don’t have conversations, just having that, you know.