“The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” – Mother Teresa
With my newest book Unholy coming out later this month on October 20th (!!), I’ve been thinking about my hero, Thomas, who happens to be a vampire. When we first meet Thomas, he seems to be doing pretty well for himself. He lives on a college campus, where there’s always a party he can crash for a midnight snack and no shortage of lovely young college girls he can seduce when the mood strikes him. He is handsome, powerful, confident, and immortal. But as he starts to experience flashes of his former life as a human, he realizes he is something else.
He is lonely.
Loneliness is not a state of being reserved for the undead. We have all felt it, and some of us experience loneliness more intensely or more frequently than others. In an age when “connection” is a buzz word and technology seems to exist solely to bring people together, it’s hard to imagine how anyone with access to the Internet could ever feel lonely. But I would argue that it is because of our love of and dependence on technology that we can sometimes feel more isolated than ever.
We walk down the street with our eyes glued to our phone reading a news article (or, in my case, a romance novel I recently downloaded). We log onto social media platforms to find out where our friends (or sometimes just random people we happen to follow) are, what they are doing, and what they think about world events. We type out words on a screen to “communicate” with family members, see the colors of the world unfold through the camera lens on our phones instead of with our eyes, and choose to be more invested in the fictional lives of characters on a show than in the real struggles of our neighbors.
We have forgotten how to have conversations with each other. We’ve abandoned the rules our parents and grandparents adhered to and have no problem bringing up religion and politics with people we’ve just met, because we assume they must have the same views that we do (or at least that they should). We neglect the importance of physical contact in bringing comfort to others and to ourselves and instead seek physical pleasures and overindulgence to numb our pain.
We have become vampires, and as Thomas would tell you (if he did not only exist in a book), the life of a vampire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
As the colder weather sets in and we get ready for the holiday season, let us remember to make true connections with others. Let’s look people in the eye and smile. When we ask someone how they’re doing, let’s actually listen for their response, and let’s care. Let us squeeze someone’s shoulder, pat them on the back, give them a hug. And most of all, let us find the love in our hearts and pour it out to others so that it will come back to us.
So that we can fight off the loneliness, once and for all.
- Kathryn Amurra