Loneliness is an island from which it’s hard to escape – why maintaining childhood connections might be vital for adult mental health

I spent the weekend in vicarious activity. We took Jonah to look round the posh school (in reality, not so much posher than the grammar school I once attended, for all it would cost me another decade of financial freedom). 

We got through days three and four of the 30 day screen-free challenge (the kids substituted Stampy on YouTube for Spongebob on Netflix because I’d forgotten to include telly – when they weren’t winding each other up to elicit an explosive reaction from me). 

Tom wallpapered a single wall in two rolls of eye-wateringly expensive paper. I got my hair coloured with eye-wateringly expensive highlights. A friend’s house party got cancelled, so instead I drank rosé on Saturday afternoon and went home giggly in time to malign the hideousness of X-factor, worrying about how well I’d sleep that night.

Despite this largesse, for most of it, I just felt empty. In the past, I could blame feelings of unhappiness on concrete things – work stress, financial difficulties, hormones, Jonah’s once epic tantrums, people not being nice or family strife. But now I realise the crux of it is loneliness. And as with many things, I found myself blaming my parents, although there’s always more to everything than that. 

I found myself longing to return to my childhood, a wistful nostalgia that’s been intensifying since I bumped into an old schoolfriend – who I’d not seen in 20 years – at Ascot food festival several weekends ago, and resulted in me google stalking members. It’s a feeling that, though irrational, is no less evocative, resulting in my spending much of Saturday’s evening hangover googling ex-primary school class mates I’d stood next to in class photos of yore.

The chance meeting with my old friend- the daughter of my old childminder, who still lives no more than a mile from where we both grew up – brought home to me how far I’ve gone to get to the same point in space and time.

 We fell almost instantaneously into easy conversation, of the type you can only have if you both know the same people and places. We shared our mutual struggle and joy of motherhood and marriage, and the fact we now work in similar industries, despite being segregated at 13- onto the grammar school for me while she stayed on at the local secondary with friends she still knows well, before I was uprooted once more at 15, kicked out as a teen by my dad for teenage behaviour, and never saw any of them again. 

Meeting her again after all these years really hit home to me how important these long-term connections are as you go through life – the support network of friends and family who’ve known you since you were a child- more important, for life outcomes perhaps, Theresa May, than any philosophical return to an outdated educational system. I laughed wryly to myself that, despite the divergence in our teenage fortunes, we both work for similar industries, doing, no doubt, similarly unmanagerial jobs. But I wasn’t joking when I told my old friend I’d been to hell and back since I saw her last.

Now, there’s little in the town I once called home – a feeling that’s let me feeling cut adrift for two decades. After the passing, in my twenties, of the twin anchors of my paternal grandparents, who were central to bringing me up after my mother left, and with the gradual distancing of my step-mother when my father ditched her for a younger woman, it’s hard for me to feel a sense of my childhood, and thus, perhaps, myself. 

We all have to grow up and accept and move on. Yes, I have friends and family at the end of the phone, or as it is more common these days, Facebook messenger. No one’s died – not recently – but it feels as though a piece of myself has disappeared- the piece that’s rooted to a place and time when I felt most loved, or at least most ‘at home’.

This sense of dislocation shows in my thinning hair, which I lopped off this month after four years’ attempted growth; my encroaching frown  and it’s likely cause: the e-cigarette I keep clutched in my paw like a crack pipe. I felt embarrassed, when I met my old friend, that I couldn’t hold off from using it, despite her young children around. For all they’re nicotine free, I’m addicted the comfort I draw from something to do with my hands. Perhaps it’s because I was a thumb sucker as a child  – a habit I finally kicked for the sake of my teeth aged seven. But the state of my lungs feels like a small price to pay for a nigh-on full-time emotional crutch. And unlike me, who passed out on the train going home, my friend wasn’t drinking. 

My social anxiety has resulted – or perhaps stems from -struggling to build well-balanced friendships as an adult – a combination of the genes that made my parents so impetuous and difficult, and the psychological fallout from them both. It’s telling how jubilant I felt when a friend from my troubled teens finally called to arrange a catch up – the parenting years have unfurled for both of us, interrupting our friendship and putting it on tenterhooks, for all we occasionally correspond online. I’d started to think this friendship too had fallen by the wayside. It’s easy for someone with such a fragile sense of self as myself to feel ex-communicated by people you once relied upon. And it feels telling that, the day we were due to meet, she cancelled, for all she probably had good reasons of her own. 

I’ve been unceremoniously dumped by women several times over in my lifetime. My neediness is clearly offputing to the well-supported and easily likeable. My circle has dwindled to just a few and even those I have, for all they can feel like a replacement family can also sometimes feel a little toxic: fragile types with difficult childhoods and often difficult kids, who commiserate in our addictions and occasionally spat in the knowledge we’ll make up because, well, no one else will have us. Without the checks and balances of local loyalty and community judgement, it’s easier to exploit and be exploited. 

My gratitude at being included makes me open to abuse. In the same way, I often feel trapped in a marriage that has, for so long, been my only source of stability. I feel myself clawing at the gilded cage of normality, getting unreasonably angry at Tom for his optimism, and the kids for their challenges and myself for my stalling life progress. 

Mostly I brazen it out, substituting financial stability for good mental health; cleanliness and order at home for a sense of satisfaction with my life. I know it’s not healthy, but I’ve been compensating so long, I don’t know another way to be. Other times it bubbles out in tears, recriminations and nihilism.

And so it boiled over at Jonah’s response to the school across the river – the one that’s so similar to the academic hothouses of my teens – the schools from which I took certificates rather than solid friendships. He flopped through the tour, nonplussed (though perhaps a kinder interpretation would see he was just overwhelmed and shy). His pigeontoeing seemed all the more marked, despite the brand new (eye-wateringly expensive) Nikes. Nevermind that he’s finally learned to lace them; next to his bushytailed peers who’d already leaped over the financial, academic and perhaps more importantly, social hurdles he would face to get there. So it’s hard to swallow that perhaps we’d be foolish to let him compete at all. 

Indeed, when we pressed for what he thought, there was no exhilaration about the opportunity; rather he’d prefer to stay with his friends (with whom, I sometimes feel,  he hasn’t the most balanced of friendships either- his teacher this week asked whether we would agree to him trying ‘circle of friends‘- an initiative to help his peer group better understand his challenges, which we’ve turned down in the past for its potential to turn him into a target). Instead, he got angry about something unrelated – going for pizza, rather than sushi afterwards – and sulked when he did not get dessert. As I’ve said before, it takes so much more than an eye-wateringly expensive education for a child to go on to be successful. Perhaps, then,  I need to recognise that my own limitations extend far beyond my abilities to get good grades, as much as his do.

Yet, it’s because I have compensated for my childhood identity crisis with other markers of success that I want my own children to appreciate the effort I’m willing to take for theirs. But then again, perhaps Jonah just wants to feel normal. And given how I’m feeling right now, perhaps he’s the cleverer for it. Perhaps then, nothing feels as good – no not as success nor (in the words of Kate Moss) skinny feels- but as knowing who you are. And no one makes you feel yourself more than those who’ve known you longest.

What to do about it then? –  I know I should do good works and engage in local activities to feel better, but these things come with their own politics which I find difficult enough to navigate at the best of times, not least when I feel depressed.

To learn not to stress about my own children’s future, and trust that they know best what to do for their own happiness and fulfilment is challenging, but necessary, amid my ongoing distress at my social limitations and stilted aspirations.

To try to engage in the past with which I’m still in contant – the friendlier types who engage with my Facebook statuses even though we’ve not met up in years. But it can be hard to get in touch out of the blue – even my old friend’s warm invitations to keep in touch feel hollow without a tangibld excuse to visit. 

Not simply to appease family members who want a relationship only on their own terms, but to get actively involved – I felt rueful as my niece’s fifth birthday celebrations passed this weekend without a visit – the averted two hour car journey perhaps compensated for by an unexpected Facetime with her cousins.

Likewise, I watched my own cousin’s trip from Canada with her son from afar, jealously flicking over reunion pictures on Facebook from which our side of the family were absent – her packed two week schedule did not allow for a catch up, though we keep promising we’ll do it sooner or later. 

It’s just that later seems to be approaching apace. The ache in my soul I paper over with the material trappings of nondescript normality, like the inscription we scrawled on the wall before Tom pasted over it, to be revealed in all likelihood by those who never knew me at all.