Being lonely is different from what you think. It’s a mental thing. It’s not just being alone physically, not simply the physical absence of company causing you to yearn to surround yourself with individuals just because you want to socialize. You yearn to surround yourself with people around you so that the presence of others can distract you from loneliness. Loneliness, see, it is a constant and consistent feeling, the fear, the sadness, the desperation of wanting something, but yet you do not know what it is. You are lonely and empty, and the loneliness actually causes the emptiness, forcing you to try and find something, anything, to fill up that emptiness. You are alone. Mentally, even if you physically aren’t. As mentioned before, you fill yourself in rooms full of people, familiar and friendly faces, momentarily filling up the deep darkness and emptiness inside of you. And for a brief moment, you are content. But in an instance, you’re being content with the situation changes and the loneliness comes back, and the momentary happiness slips away into thin air. It is a vicious cycle. We strive to fill our loneliness. But we don’t know how to fill it, or what to fill it with. We try to find passions, careers, relationships. Or we use external methods of escape such as facing the bottle or taking that pill. But the artificial happiness created by external factors such as love and other drugs soon and suddenly evaporate. We find or search for pointless careers in which we try to find a purpose within such careers hoping we find our calling, or purpose. Some lucky ones find such purpose, but us, the lonely, cannot. Soon such loneliness will return to haunt us. The empty space within us will always fill up with momentary and artificial happiness before we are drained and stripped of such happiness or empathy, leaving us just as empty as we were before. But despite our faults, our loneliness, we smile through the pain, through the despair, the emptiness, and through the loneliness. We don’t know how to solve it, but we are trying to. There is no scientific cure for loneliness as I believe that loneliness correlates with our souls, not simply our genetic makeup regarding cognitive function. Loneliness is a matter of the soul, a soul who feels empty and alone, yet through the pain, we know we must persevere. So we smile, we are lonely, but we smile because that is exactly what we need to do. We cannot let our loneliness engulf us, we cannot let our sadness bury us. We cannot hide it, but what we can do, is fight it. Smile, day by day, fight by fight, battle with loneliness, and eventually one lone-full night, the loneliness will evaporate because we have won the fight. You cannot give up, be brave and be bright. Loneliness sucks, but we must persevere and not let it take our lives. Smile, because someday everything will be alright.