In 2017 I received a copy of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine for Christmas. Each year I gave my dad a list of books I would like and, from the pile on Christmas Day, select one to be the ‘last book of the year’ that I would aim to read in that slump between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. If you haven’t heard of it (which would surprise me only because it seemed to have an extraordinarily long life, and became a Reese’s Book Club pick when that was at the height of its cultural relevance) it’s about a 29-year-old woman in Glasgow called Eleanor who has a fairly unexciting job at a graphic design firm. Eleanor has nobody in her life, and gets blackout drunk on vodka every weekend alone in her flat to numb the loneliness, until a chance encounter forces her to slowly open up her world. It’s still one of my favourite books, and when I queried my first book I made a list of agencies I dreamed of and put the author Gail Honeyman’s, at the top. I did end up being signed with them for a while which made me think for a while that I was exceptionally good at manifesting.
At the time, loneliness discourse seemed to pop up on the online spaces I was in – the book had sparked discussions on loneliness being a bigger health risk than cancer, about twentysomething like Eleanor who were also lonely. At the time, I did not consider myself a lonely person. I was in my early twenties and in a long-term relationship. I lived at home with my dad and our dog and one of my best friends lived down the road, just a ten minute walk away. I commuted into the city every day for my Fancy Media Job at BuzzFeed when it was the height of cool to work at BuzzFeed.
Fast forward eight years and I’m on a bench at the train station in tears. I find my life now is split into two moods – Sad and Debilitatingly Sad. Sad is the normal low-level grief I feel from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. The constant hum of my life is my dad has died my dad has died my dad has died which I think as I take the bins out and sit in work meetings and brush my teeth before bed. Debilitatingly Sad tends to come in waves though often clustered together, weeks where I cry every day, uncontrollably. The hum turns ears splitting. MY DAD HAS DIED MY DAD HAS DIED OH MY GOD MY DAD HAS DIED! At the train station I was Debilitatingly Sad, holding it together while on the carriage and then collapsing the moment my feet touched the platform. My shoulders were heaving, my head in my hands. I wailed and wailed like a baby and oh god I wanted to be a baby. I would get so irritated at my dad for still seeing me as a child in some ways no matter how old I got, but in his absence it was all I craved.
‘Are you okay?’ I heard a woman’s voice and looked up. She had a lanyard on that suggested she worked at the big supermarket in the high street and looked around sixty-something.
‘I miss my dad,’ I said.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I miss mine too.’
I told her what happened. My whole situation in as short a summary as I could. Me and dad. Always me and dad. And then a sick dad. And now no dad, no anybody. The woman consoled me.
After a while she said, ‘You know, you’ll have a family of your own one day.’
‘I won’t,’ I said, finding it easy to vocalise this fear to a stranger.
‘You only think that right now because you’re lonely.’
I was shocked that this stranger was able to see something that felt so privately held to me. I hadn’t used the word when speaking to her but she was right, I was lonely. I am lonely.
‘It feels weird saying that but yeah, I am lonely,’ I said to my best friend Bianca on one of the podcast-length voice notes I regularly send her a few days ago, many weeks now since the train station incident. ‘But it’s true. I sort of feel like a lonely elderly person…but 31.’
I thought again of Eleanor Oliphant. What does it mean to be young and lonely? Often when I catch up with friends they’ll kindly tell me I’m doing well given everything happening, that it looks like I’m keeping busy. A few say I look great, which I don’t mind and is mostly funny because it reminds me of that Fleabag scene where she keeps getting complimented at her mother’s funeral. And on the outside I am doing well. On my days in the office I chat to my desk mates and rarely find myself without someone to spend lunch with if I want. In my personal life, though I’m not part of a big group I have a lot of strong, longstanding one-on-one friendships I’ve nurtured for many years and have generally found it easy to turn situational friends (work, gym) into actual friends. I know that I’m affable and popular, two traits my dad also possessed. Even as the grief consumes me I still go to birthday parties and dinners and coffees and concerts and get invited to things. But nonetheless, without my dad here I am lonely in a way I did not think it was possible. My dad was not just my go-to person but I was his. I was his emergency contact. I was who he told about his bad days and good days at work. I was who witnessed his lows and highs as he witnessed mine. I was his jaan, the crown jewel in his life.
‘I think you’re the only person who sees the unhappiness in my heart,’ I told Bianca.
‘The thing is, I know even though you’re out and about, you’re still very sad,’ she said and I was relieved that she agreed, that she saw through the suspiciously full calendar I tried to keep.
I’ve been told many times that life grows around grief, that the void left behind by my dad will never shrink but life will expand so that, in relation to the rest of my world, it will appear smaller. I joke sometimes that on paper my life looks like a caricature of loneliness – parentless, partnerless, siblingless – and that if I’d written a character with my situation I think my agent would suggest I at least give her a sister or something. As I put it a few months ago, ‘I am nobody’s daughter or sister or mother or the love of anyone’s life. I am people’s friend and coworker and I just wish I was more things.’ I posted recently on my Close Friends how crazy it is that nobody will ever love me as my dad did. A friend replied, ‘they will, but it will be different.’ She is not the first person to have so much conviction about this. Many friends have said a version of, ‘you don’t have to imagine things being different, I’ll imagine it for you.’ I sometimes think of all these friends picturing a better life for me, carrying the weight of this hope when I can’t at the moment, and I think that the loneliness is real but so is the love, and how strange it is to have such an abundance of both at once.