"I think it's this long-term, intense loneliness that many people don't understand."

"They don't realise that loneliness can come alive, that it can start to snap and hound at a life."

Emily White — author of "Lonely: A Memoir" — writes:

I felt a certain dumbing down in the midst of my loneliness. I couldn't read as quickly or as well as I used to. I wasn't as imaginative. I said less. Without people around me, I began to feel as though I were taking up less space. I sometimes felt so ungrounded, so immaterial and unreal, that I thought I might just drift away....

I became less spontaneous, less confident and secure. Interacting with others, I had to hide my feeling of marginalisation, and since marginalisation had come to define my life, I wound up hiding most of myself. I wanted to turn back into the former me, the connected me, but I couldn't find my way back.