When I moved to Denver at thirty-one for a job, I told everyone back home how great it was. The mountains. The lifestyle. The people. I posted pictures of trails I had hiked alone and restaurants I had eaten at alone and tagged them to look like I was having the life I had imagined.
On weekends, when people asked what I had been up to, I said I was “so busy, it’s been crazy.” I said this so many times it started to feel true. I developed entire fictional social lives in my head — the brunch I would have gone to, the friends who would have been there.
The truth was I knew almost no one. I had work acquaintances I never saw outside of the office. I had a neighbor whose name I didn’t know. I had a coffee shop where the barista recognized my order, which felt, on my worse days, like intimacy.
I kept a journal that year. Reading it back now, what strikes me most is not the loneliness itself — it is how much energy I spent hiding it. From friends back home. From my family. From myself.
At month eleven, I signed up for a running club. Not because I wanted to run. Because I needed to be near people at a predictable time and place without any pressure to perform friendship immediately.
Two years later, two of my closest friends are people I met in that running club. One of them recently told me she joined for exactly the same reason I did.
Loneliness in America is an epidemic we don’t talk about because we’ve made it shameful. I wasted nearly a year pretending I wasn’t experiencing something that almost everyone around me was experiencing too.
The cure I found was embarrassingly simple: show up somewhere regularly and wait.