239. What is the 'loneliest' chapter of our 20s?

At some stage in our 20s, all of us will experience what I call 'The Loneliest Chapter' - a period where we feel detached, disconnected and isolated. Whilst this experience can feel terrible and make us question our relationships, friendships and selves, it's an important rite of passage and actually ends up teaching us a lot. In today's episode we discuss: 

• What is the 'lonely' chapter of our 20s?
• My personal journey with loneliness 
• What are some signs you may be in it, right now? 
• Why does this occur? What creates this period? 
• How can we learn to tolerate and enjoy solitude? 
• What are the benefits of loneliness? 
• How can we make new friends and feel like we belong? 

All of that, and more...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.

(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here back for another episode as we, of
course break down the psychology of our twenties. What we're
talking about today is very near and dear in my heart.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
You know. I wouldn't say it's my favorite thing to
talk about, because it's not a very pleasant topic, but
it's something that really, I think strums on my heartstrings,
really follows me around for long stretches of time, and
it's something that I have begun to feel very at
peace with. And that thing is loneliness. Loneliness is something

(01:06):
that all of us in our twenties are going to experience.
If you're not experiencing it now, it is coming for you.
It's going to be around the corner. But what does
it actually mean to feel lonely during a time of
your life? That everybody will quickly tell you are the
best years of your life. Everyone's going to say your
twenties are way you should be most social, you'd have

(01:28):
the most fun, you should be meeting your forever friends.
But what if that is not your experience? Where do
we find ourselves? How do we cope? This is actually
an experience I've seen on the rise, friends, listeners, strangers
asking me, why do I feel so lonely? Why do
I feel so lonely despite having people around me, despite

(01:51):
being young and carefree, despite feeling like I'm doing everything
that I can to build community. And I have an
answer for you. It's so what I like to call
the loneliest chapter of your twenties. This is a specific
period that we all go through, the loneliest chapter where
regardless of how many relationships and friends we have, how

(02:13):
many hours we spend socializing, how often we are surrounded
with others, we still feel inexplicably lonely and emotionally isolated.
Not necessarily physically isolated, but like we are kind of
an island within it all. And this lonely chapter it's
going to hit us all at some stage. I actually

(02:34):
think it's a rite of passage. I think it's a
really important transition and milestone, and you know, it feels
really hard to explain, especially when you're in it, but
afterwards you kind of end up realizing that this was
something that you had to go through. Perhaps you know
you have to go through it because you were outgrowing
people and we needed to speed up that process. Maybe

(02:55):
because you're going through a major life change and you
need more time to reflect on your own experiences and
your own emotions. Maybe you've just seen your broader social
circle shrink and you need to kind of realize that
it's time to maybe move on from those friends, make
new friends, move into this new chapter. I don't know

(03:17):
what it is. I can't speak to what you're going
through personally, but I do think that it's unavoidable, and
I think that it's actually quite necessary for us to
experience this kind of sacred solitude early on in our lives,
in our twenties, all this shedding of relationships so that
we can truly know what fills our cup, We can

(03:37):
truly fall in love with our own company. We can
know that solitude is not scary, it's sacred, and we
can grow through it. And actually, by going through this
lonely period, we end up coming out more social and
connected than ever. And I'm going to explain why that is. So,
this is what we're talking about today. What is the

(03:59):
loneliest chapter of our twenties? Why? Why might you be
finding yourself there right now? Why is it completely normal?
But more importantly, why is it really valuable not to
run from this loneliness and fill up your time with
empty relationships and with destructions and with random people, and
instead invest in the relationship you have with yourself. That

(04:20):
is the longest relationship you are ever going to have.
There is no relationship that will outlive the relationship you
have with yourself. So let's talk about when loneliness factors
in to this equation. Let's find out together without further ado,
I want to explain exactly what is going on if
you find yourself in this period in this chapter right now,

(04:41):
let's get into it. A few years back, it came
across this spirituality phrase called the dark Knight of the soul,
and it just stuck with me. The concept of like
the dark Knight of the soul. It originated in Spain,
I think back in like this sixteenth century, if I've

(05:01):
got my history right, and it's basically used to describe
a really painful period in your life, a crisis that
completely transforms you. It creates a complete shift and how
you see the world, how you see yourself, your values,
the meaning that you apply to experiences, and it actually
doesn't need to be triggered by anything. It's more of

(05:24):
an unconscious or not even unconscious, more of an ego death,
a rethinking of who you are. Now. Some philosophers would
tell you that they actually believe it's necessary to grow
through this dark night in order to really understand yourself
and your life. And if you don't go through that,
you never actually gain self actualization, clarity, and true fulfillment. Now,

(05:47):
I think that the Loneliest chapter of our twenties does
the same thing, but instead of being for our perspective
and our identity, it's for our relationships. And you do
need to go through this in order to deepen how
you inevitably can with people and what you see is important.
So what does this chapter look like, what does it
kind of What are the symptoms or the signs that
you're going through this? Well, I think loneliness above or else,

(06:11):
but not just loneliness because of a lack of physical
relationships like your lack of people around you. You know,
it's very natural to feel lonely if you are struggling
with any friendship, you know, if you actually just don't
have friends. But I also think it's a sense of
boredom in your pre existing friendships, almost like an apathy

(06:31):
towards wanting to hang out with them. Is a great
desire to withdraw away or to not feel like you're
fulfilled by your current relationships. There also may be like
a heightened level of self criticism, feeling like you don't
deserve the level and the depth of the relationships that
you crave. A sense of restlessness like oh my god,
I need to be making new friends. I feel so lost,

(06:53):
I feel so aimless, and also some existential reflection. Being
around people is is definitely one of the best distractions
from looking straight at our thoughts, and so when being
around other people is not available as a distraction, when
it's not doing its job anymore, all those thoughts and
feelings that we have unintentionally suppressed become very loud. It's

(07:17):
really common, you know, for people to experience this when
they move to a new city, a new country, when
they go through a breakup, when they have their first child.
You're going through a transition that disconnects you, and that's
when you really enter the lonely chapter. The other big
indicator for me is it feels like you're writing what
I like to call the friendship roller coaster. Now we

(07:38):
have spoken about this on the podcast before, but this
is a term that I originated, and it basically describes how,
at one moment you might feel incredibly fulfilled and happy
and delighted by your friendships. The next moment, you're at
the bottom of the roller coaster. You're constantly feeling miserable
about your friendships, you feel at a low point, and

(07:58):
then you're back at the topic in and it's exhilarating
and it's anxiety inducing and it's stressful. Nothing is changing, right,
You're still in the same vehicle, you're still strapped into
the same spot. The people in the roller coaster with
you have not changed, but it's the path that you're taking.
And it really does feel like at one moment you
have so many friends and then literally the next day

(08:19):
nothing's changed and it feels like you have none. And
that is I think really indicative of this lonely chapter.
It's indicative that something needs to change. Sometimes I think
it also comes on slowly, right. You might wake up
one day and realize that your level of socialization, how
often you see people, the amount of quality time you

(08:40):
have with people has declined. Could have been a rapid descent,
especially if there was a really major life change for you,
or it could be gradual. And I like to give
the analogy of the frog in boiling water. So if
you don't know this analogy, it's kind of a sad one.
But essentially, if you put a frog in a big

(09:03):
what's it called pot, a big pot, a big pot
of water, and you put it over the stove and
you start to slowly boil the water, the frog actually
will not jump out, and it will end up being
burned alive, whereas if you dump a frog into a
pot of boiling water, will immediately jump out. This can
go with friendships. You might slowly see that you know,

(09:25):
one friend dropped off, one friend moved. You know, one
friend you don't talk to as much. One friend got
a boyfriend, so you don't talk to her as much.
Another friend, you know, you stopped working with them, so
it's not a daily interaction, and it's kind of happening
one by one, the water is slowly boiling, and then
one day you just kind of realize, like, oh, this

(09:46):
is who I was two years ago, this is who
I am now, And there is a huge difference, in
a huge distance, in who I see who I am,
how fulfilled I feel. I was talking to my friend
Sarah this the other day and how when she first
moved to Sydney, her social calendar was just, oh my gosh,

(10:06):
so intense. And she is still a relatively social person,
but she was talking about how she would pack a
bag for Friday and she would go and stay with
friends on Friday, and she would have like her day
was split into I think like five sections, four or
five sections. So she had a pre morning which was
like five till nine, then she had a normal morning

(10:27):
which was like ten to twelve, and she had like
afternoon which was like one to three. Then she had
like dinner time, and then she had like the evening slot,
and she would see a new group of people, or
she would see people in every single block of time.
Every single one of those blocks would be full for
the whole weekend. And she was like, I just I

(10:49):
just don't do that anymore. And she was like, I
don't realize. I didn't realize when it happened, but I
kind of like woke up and like that just wasn't
my life. And I had that same experience where I
felt like I had this awakening where I was like, Wow,
I just don't socialize the way I used to. Something
needs to change because I'm feeling quite lonely. This is
going to sound ridiculous, but the thing that triggered it

(11:12):
for me was brack Girl Summer. I yes, the Charlie
XCX album and all the stuff that came along with that.
I don't know what it was, but it reminded me
of like who I perhaps was maybe four or five
years ago, and how I wasn't her anymore. And it
really made me take a real good look at my

(11:32):
friendships and be like, huh, I've kind of been coasting
on relate on the backs of relationships that I've had
for years without making new friends. I since have, but
for a long time, you know, I was just slowly
adjusting to a way of life that actually felt inherently lonely,
and I felt like I was very displaced in the

(11:57):
in the reality that I've created. So why does this
actually happen? What would developmental psychologists tell us about this,
tell us about this transition or this huge drop. Well,
what creates this experience is actually two parallel experiences. The
first is the loss of old friends and the difficulty
in maintaining those relationships at the same level within the

(12:20):
changing circumstances of our twenties. And the second is difficulty
in making new friends, not necessarily replacing those old friends,
but just creating that same sense of belonging with new
people in a similar way to the people that we
previously had in our lives. Where can we find those
environments and those spaces where we actually feel like we belong?

(12:45):
So I'm going to begin by focusing on that first experience,
the loss of old friends, even if they're not necessarily
out of your life, we do tend to notice the
further we get into this decade a distance, and I
think that can be explained by three things typically occur
during this period of life. First, we have splintering paths.

(13:05):
You know, if you grew up with a group of
people at the same time, you're the same age, you're
going through the same experiences at the same time, so
you know you are in primary school, you're in high school,
you're going off to college after university, you're working those
part time jobs together. You have all this time together.
The experiences are very parallel. You could spend the ages

(13:26):
of like two to like twenty two in the exact
same environment, doing the exact same thing as someone else,
then seeing splinter, and you no longer have those parallel
experiences in the parallel environments. You no longer have the
convenience of seeing others at school, or seeing others at

(13:46):
a part time job, or seeing others you know studying
with each other at university. There is no longer the
ease and the convenience of maintaining a long term friendship
with someone who you've been really close to for a
whole lot of time. This can also be precipitated by
being life change. You know, people do move, people have children,

(14:07):
People experience a whole crazy different amalgamation of life experiences.
They're not all going to be the same. So sometimes
if someone's priorities and complete path in life is suddenly directed,
we can't always keep up and the relationship falls by
the wayside. Finally, and this is a huge one, especially

(14:28):
in our I would say mid to late twenties, is
that we get life partners, or we get partners, A
lot of us start to take dating a lot more seriously.
It's a big transition, I would say, or a big
distinction between people who are in emerging adulthood versus full
blown adulthood. It's the prioritization of partnership. So I say

(14:52):
this a lot actually, and I this is a very
deep belief of mine. I think that your friends are
the most important relationship between like eighteen and twenty six,
But then after twenty six, about fifty percent of us start,
or a large majority of us really start, you know,
putting our partner as the most important relationship until you
know we have kids. So that is how I see

(15:14):
like our relationship priorities changing over the course of our life.
If you're in your twenties, you might be smack bang
in the middle of that transition, the transition towards partnership.
And if you don't have a partner but your friends do,
it can feel like you're left out. It's interesting because,
according to research done by the University of Kansas, we
lose an average of two friends per year in our

(15:36):
mid to late twenties. And that carries on into our thirties.
I think it's a combination of all these factors, of
all these different lifestyle shifts and changes and environments and
situations and contexts and blah blah blah that all combine
to make friendship during this decade a lot harder. Now

(15:57):
when it comes to making new friends. We've already spoken
about this, but you know, you're no longer in environments
that make friendship convenient and that are effortlessly social. The
number one way that people make new friends in adulthoods
is through work. Even that that's not effortly social, it's
just that you're close by to someone and you're in

(16:19):
the trenches together, so it's easy to form a relationship
those environments. You've got to remember when we were kids,
and when we were teenagers, and when we were in
our early twenties. There are a lot more of those
environments available to us. Here's another really interesting insight. The
most valuable factor for predicting whether a friendship will take

(16:40):
place between two people. According to researchers, this is the
number one factor that they cite. It's familiarity. Familiarity followed
by similarity and proximity. But essentially what they will say
to you is that if you want new connections and
you want new friendships, the more familiar you are with someone,
the more bond did you feel. And what does familiarity

(17:02):
require above or else. It's time. It's time, something that
we have less and less of the older we get
and the more our day is split into quadrants and
pieces and quld reports and you know everything. Just everyone
wants a piece. We have less time devoted to friendships,
but time is the crucial element. Jeffrey Hall, he's an

(17:25):
expert in the psychology of friendship, and he studied four
hundred and fifty individuals over the course of I think
six months to a year, and he found that it
took about forty five hours of being in the presence
of another person's company for you to consider that they
are no longer an acquaintance but a friend. To move
from casual friend to a meaningful friendship took fifty hours

(17:49):
over a three month period, and to move into the
inner close friendship circle it took another one hundred hours.
When we were younger, we had that time to invest
in friendship, shared experiences, core memories. But now that time
is filled with work, chores, just being tired. I was

(18:11):
also speaking to a friend about this the other day
about how if you move cities or you move countries,
people often have their established social circles. It's very hard
to kind of find your way in. So if you
are the expat, the new person in town, you're also
going to I think, particularly struggle. It's interesting because I'm

(18:32):
seeing a lot of friends of mine and a lot
of people that I knew from union in high school, like,
all moving to London or moving to Europe or New
Zealand or the US, and they all end up finding
each other again because they already have that pre established
sense of familiarity. So all of this goes to say,
if you're experiencing this period of writing the friendship roller coaster,

(18:53):
if you are entering or in the midst of the
loneliest chapter of your twenties, you are not alone as
a whole developmental transitionary shift occurring in your life. That
is meaning that your day and your weeks and your
months feel a lot more devoid of a sense of
connection and a sense of being seen. We're all going

(19:16):
to go through it at least once, maybe even more
and I want to talk about where to next, because
what's really important to state is that this is actually
a chapter. It is not permanent, it is not the
rest of the story, and each of us will get
through it. We are meant to get through it. There
is something brighter on the other side. There is a

(19:37):
reprioritization of certain relationships, There is a reaching out. There
is basically a conclusion to this chapter that I want
you to find, and something better that comes after it.
So we are going to talk about all of that
and more after this shortbreak. It is my belo that

(20:00):
I've said many many times, but I really wanted to
come across that loneliness is actually not a curse. It's
not a disease. It's more than that. It's an emotional cueue,
it is a physical cue. It is an instinctual, evolutionary queue.
The same way that we experience hunger and thirst as
indicators that we are in need of something, we also

(20:23):
experience loneliness. So take it as a sign from your
body and a sign from your mind that it's simply
just a need that is not fulfilled and that you
do need to reach out when you can also learn
to be lonely and to you turn that into a skill.

(20:43):
You importantly are no longer reliant on relationships that don't
fulfill you because solitude is no longer a punishment. The
psychologist Carl Jung actually believed that solitude could almost be medicinal,
could almost be healing, because it led to de personal
growth and self actualization, especially in a world that is

(21:05):
full full of so many interactions, full of so much noise,
so much stimulus, so much information coming in. When do
you get a time to yourself? When was the last
time you had a time to yourself where there wasn't
something in front of your face or in your ears,
or you know, something that you were interacting with. Solitude

(21:26):
provides us with that space. Being alone gives you a
chance to reflect on who you are, on your goals.
It can bring greater self awareness personal development. You also
gain something else really valuable, which is the ability to
tolerate discomfort instead of going back to shit people. I
see a lot of people who have, if I'm being honest,

(21:49):
not great friends, really terrible friends who they actually don't
like and who are quite awful to them, But they
continue to feel this really intense obligation and loyalty to
them because they are the only thing that is between
them and loneliness. And when you are scared of loneliness,

(22:09):
you will accept, you know, the hell that you know,
over that uncertainty and over that discomfort. People try a
lot of ways to get comfortable with discomfort. They try
I spars, they try extreme sports, extreme meditation. But who
would have thought that just sitting with a lonely feeling
is another way to reap the same rewards and to actually,

(22:33):
and I'm going to say this, make you less attached
to the people who don't deserve your attachment. I'm not
saying that it means that you need to withdraw or
that you need to deliberately isolate yourself. I mean that
when you have a sense of allegiance with your loneliness,
when you feel like it is your friend rather than
your enemy, you are not scared to choose the solitary,

(22:56):
lonely path if it looks better than the one in
which you have you know, crap people around you, in
which you are being mistreated, in which you are being
poorly treated, I guess as well. So that was a
really important lesson for me to learn, especially I used
to have a real intense fear of loneliness. I used
to be really scared of what it would mean to

(23:18):
be ostracized, be isolated. It made me feel unlovable to
not be around people all the time. It made me
feel like I was forgettable, and that led me to
really stay in situations that I didn't deserve to be in.
But after a breakup, actually quite a few years ago,
around six years ago, I went and spent some time
with my grandma. Now, my grandma has the most amazing

(23:40):
beautiful house in the Gold Coast in Queensland and Australia.
It is like a jungle oasis next to the beach
up in the hills. We have our own gardens, we
have there's chickens, there's baby quails, there's kangaroos, there's bridges
and streams. It's glorious. And I spent a lot long
amount of time in that house just with her, really

(24:04):
healing after a breakup where I felt like I couldn't
trust myself to continue to be around people who I
knew were bad for me because I was constantly going
to choose them over myself. And in that time, it
was hard, It was really really difficult but I rewired
and I reprogrammed part of my personality, and I would

(24:25):
say my social blueprint that craved any form of a
validation from being around people, any form of it, even
when it came at my own expense. There is a
very little promised in life. But I think, yes, loneliness
is one of those things. But the other thing is change.
It can't stay like this forever. And so whilst you
are on this lonely chapter, I really want you to

(24:46):
get the most out of it that you can. As
Carl Jung said, you know, it might actually be one
of the biggest gifts to have a moment alone, to
have a moment where you're not scared to be alone.
So this is how I want you to Actually, I'm
not going to say enjoy the moment, but receive the
gift from the lonely moment. Firstly, acknowledge your feelings. Please

(25:08):
don't bury them. You will feel terrible at times. It
isn't comfortable because humans aren't meant to be alone forever.
But the people who miss out on the lesson from
this period, those who avoid ever feeling that feeling at all,
they do seek comfort in destruction, and that is a
form of avoidance, which means that we actually continue to

(25:30):
sustain the unhealthy and fearful relationship we have with loneliness,
which is a perfectly helpful human emotion. Psychologists and more importantly,
researchers who study our unique emotional approaches to loneliness. They've
actually found that people who view this emotion as an
opportunity for self discovery rather than something to escape from,

(25:51):
they find a lot of meaning. It feels less like
isolation and more like personal space. But they also become
more clear and more focused on their goals. Here's another
amazing benefit for you if you're going through this right now.
According to a twenty twenty study that looked at our
perceptions of loneliness and the interactions or the correlation with

(26:12):
emotional intelligence amongst young adults, having a mature grasp on
loneliness makes you more emotionally intelligent. It means that your
ability to name, identify, appropriately respond to your own emotions
and then also identify those emotions in other people and
have a successful response make people feel like you relate

(26:36):
to them and that you care about them. Your ability
to do that improves, like no tomorrow. That is what
we're gaining despite what we feel like we're missing, we're
actually gaining a more keen social and emotional ability. The
second way that I think you can really help yourself
through this period is to firstly take a social media detox.

(26:58):
You know, I'm not trying to say say that this
loneliness is like the best thing ever and that you
need to be happy about it all the time. It
actually does still feel quite painful, So don't make that
experience more painful than it has to be. Take a break,
take a step back, disconnect from social media. Everythink your
relationship with it and whether it is contributing to your

(27:18):
fear of missing out and meaning that you are only
focusing on your experiences in comparison to what others look like.
I think that you'll find that the answer is yes,
and when you have less opportunities to engage in that comparison,
the joy comes back. Romanticize the experiences that you have
on your own as well. I have a friend who

(27:39):
does date nights with themselves. Once a month. They go
to an Italian restaurant, They order a glass of wine,
and they bring their journal and they answer a series
of five questions. You know what am I proud of
myself for what do I want in the next month,
What is something that I'm going through? How am I feeling?
Like a genuine check And they really look forward to

(28:02):
this date with themselves once a month. I have another
friend who does regular solo trips, another friend who goes
on daily walks in different neighborhoods, and that's like her
alone time just for her, and she's like, it's like
the best time of my day, which I love. Another
friend of mine has a tadar list, and I actually
have one of these as well. It is like a

(28:23):
folder in my phone, like an album of things that
I've experienced when I was on my own that only
I got to enjoy in that moment. Something that I
put in there the other day was like I saw
these like, oh my god, this huge mass of bees
like pollinating these poppies. And sometimes when you see beautiful
things like that, your first inclination is to be like,

(28:45):
oh my god, who can I show? Who can I tell?
And I was like, wait, I am having this experience
on my own, and that is actually really beautiful, So
I'm just gonna obviously I've just shared it with you,
so I get the irony and hypocrisy what I'm about
to say, but sometimes really appreciating that your own company
and your own experience of something is worthwhile in itself

(29:09):
means that you're no longer afraid to experience those things
by yourself. You've got to see the romance in it.
Sometimes that is the best mindset shift is to instead
of seeing like a danger or a torture, is to
be like, how can I make this beautiful and lovely
and special? I start a new hobby as well. Now
this one is like should have been number one at

(29:29):
my list. I started a ceramics class like almost four
months ago now that I've continued to do. But the
reason I did it was because I was like, every
you know, thing that I do for fun is with
other people, and I'm feeling actually quite detached from myself,
and so I know that when those other people aren't around,
I'm going to feel very lonely. So I want to

(29:50):
do something that is just for me, and I sign
up for this class. I think it was like three
hundred dollars, which a lot of money up front, but
then it pays itself forward and it has been one
of the best things for my mental health and for
my feelings of isolation during this time in my life.
I've also made a lot of friends through it. It
started off as a solo practice and has actually become

(30:13):
something upon which I've built community. You know, I have
a friend from Ireland who was doing the course with me.
I've got like, you know, the woman who sits across
from me. I'm not going to say their names because
they might not want me talking about them on this podcast,
but this woman who sits across me is like fifty
and last week she brought me in honey. And all
of that came from not being afraid to do something alone,

(30:35):
even if it felt lonely, and finding that there were
these other people who were doing the same thing, who
were also looking for connection, and we found it in
each other. If it is the case that you're the
root of your loneliness, chapter and the root of your
loneliness at this point is a deficit of good people,
try and build a routine in which you will see
the same people. So this is, you know, the ceramics

(30:56):
course is one of those things where every Tuesday I
know that I'm going to see these people and that
we're forming a bond and that we feel like we
belong together and we can share this experience. If you
have opportunities to interact with the same people at the
same time, like if you go to the same gym
class every week, you go to the same local cafes,
you go to the same art class every week, you'll

(31:18):
naturally create that familiarity and have that time investment that
we can see is really important for building new friendships.
We also have a full episode on making new friends
in your twenties because gosh, is it not hard And
I'm totally in the same boat with you when it
comes to this, So if you search that in Spotify

(31:40):
or Apple, you will find it. And finally, don't neglect
perfectly healthy friendships. I know that it can feel difficult
when we're going through this lonely chapter to look around
and be like, oh my god, I just feel miserable.
No one understands me. I don't have the relationships that

(32:01):
I want. Actually sit with yourself for ten minutes. Maybe
it's not the relationship, not the people, it's the type
of relationship you have with them. So maybe they don't
need to be completely blacked out kicked out of your life.
The relationship isn't over, It just needs to be redefined.
So focus on those healthy friendships. Focus on those people,

(32:23):
even if you're not quite friends with them yet, who
you do really want in your life and who you
really like and who you really enjoy, and try and
spend more time with them. Put more energy into the
good people, the kind people, the lovely people, the ones
who make you feel that spark and that energy and
that joy compared to relationships which are just continuing to

(32:48):
fail you and leave you feeling quite quite worthless. My
final reminder to sum up this episode, this is normal.
This is totally normal. And what it's going to allow
you to do is reconnect with yourself. It's going to
give you the motivation to make better friends, to be
a better friend, to chase connection and good conversation. And

(33:11):
I think it's also an important point for your future
self to feel grateful for where they are at. And
if that doesn't make sense, I just think that you know,
in five years time, three years time, two years time,
after you have exited the loneliest chapter of your twenties,
you are going to look back at where you are
now and you will be in a better place and

(33:32):
you'll say Oh my god, I get why I needed
to go through that, because there were all these new
relationships and friendships waiting for me on the other side,
waiting for me to discover them, and waiting for me
to discover the peace and the happiness in my solitude
that has made me a better person in my relationships.
So I hope this has been comforting. I hope this

(33:53):
has taught you something. I hope you know that you
are going to be okay and that new relationships will
come into your life so long as you focus on
the relationship you have with yourself first until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, send it to a friend,
Send it to someone who you really want to get
to know, who needs to hear this, who you care

(34:14):
about who might be going through the same thing. Make
sure that you are following along on either Apple Podcasts
or Spotify. And if you are listening on Apple podcasts,
I do have a small request if you can leave
us a five star review, that would be greatly appreciated.
Make sure that you are also following us on Instagram
because if you have follow ups to this episode, if

(34:34):
you want to vote on what episodes come out next,
you want to see when we have live events, when
things are announced, that is where you will get all
of that information. And until next time, my lovely puddlings,
stay safe, stay kind, be gentle to yourself, especially during
this lonely chapter, and we will talk very very soon,