NEWS THAT LEAVES A MARK.
How To Be Okay With Feeling Alone
Jesminpal Kaur
3rd February 2022
Reporter
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JESMINPAL KAUR talks to two individuals who struggled with enjoying their own company and are learning how to overcome loneliness.
Mr Bryan Lim on loneliness: "I had always insisted I was born an original and refuse to die a copy... but there are days that I would feel, is it me? Am I not good enough? When will it ever be enough? Why me? Why always me?" Photo: Jesminpal Kaur.
Ms Farhah Kusaini, 22, has been struggling with her mental health from a very young age.
“Random anxiety attacks would occur at times and it would hinder whatever I would be doing at the time,” she says.
However, she could not rely on the company of her friends for support when the Circuit Breaker took place in April 2020, which led her to be lonelier as she did not have a good relationship with her parents.
For Mr Bryan Lim, 27, he lived in a household where he constantly felt unwanted and faced physical abuse from his father. He started drinking in his teens and had a lot of girl-friends to cope with his situation at home.
Although the two have been through different struggles, they learnt to cope with loneliness and mental health, and these are the three tips that helped them the most.
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1. Get a hobby
Finding a hobby can help you enjoy some time alone, bringing you joy and alleviating the stress you may feel. It gives you a healthy distraction and allows you to have fun on your own.
Mr Lim found his peace in the ways of collecting Pokémon cards and figurines of his favorite TV and movie characters. Photo: Bryan Lim.
Ms Kusaini “started working out and baking more often” to cope with her “crippling anxiety and the constant loneliness”. This helped her find ways to enjoy her own company and distracted her from her “constant worrying” of not having her friends around.
When Mr Lim was younger, he used to play basketball and was inspired by Michael Jordan’s quotes. His favourite quote being, “Within adversity, if I can accept the good things that happen to me, I can certainly deal with the bad and move straight forward,” from a 1993 documentary.
Use your time to try new things, and who knows? You might find something worth carving out some alone time for.
2. Get to know yourself
Using your alone time to learn about yourself can help moderate your feelings better. Experts say that choosing to use your alone time to understand your feelings and thoughts may seem daunting but has wonderful calming effects.
For Ms Kusaini, she ventured into the world of self-help books and kept a diary for her thoughts so that she could be “in tune with her emotions”. In some ways, it helped her love herself more.
Finding activities to enjoy her own company was her focus during the Circuit Breaker period. It has since developed into feeling more comfortable on her own.
For Mr Lim, he shared how he struggled with loving himself as a teen, saying he hated “everything about [himself]” because of how he felt different from his peers and unwanted by his family.
But over time, loneliness helped him find peace in his own company.
“It's imperative to learn how to enjoy your own company, because like it or not, you're stuck with yourself for the rest of your life,” Mr Lim says. Through alone time, he learnt that he demanded high expectations of himself, constantly needing to prove that he was as good as everyone else despite his differences. He also learnt about his strengths: his endurance and hardworking nature.
3. Seek professional help
According to experts, seeking professional help when you can’t seem to find happiness in the dark is crucial.
Ms Kusaini started seeing a therapist at the end of the Circuit Breaker so she could learn how to better manage her anxiety.
A therapist helped her identify what she may need to work on, her diagnosis was possibly intergenerational trauma with underlying anxiety. This diagnosis was derived from the environment in which she was raised.
Ms Kusaini is agnostic, while her family is Muslim. While struggling with her depression when she was younger, her parents gaslighted her by blaming it on her “lack of faith”.
As such, her therapist encouraged Ms Kusaini to engage in positive self-talk instead.
“For example, if I’m comfortable, embarrassed about something, I would tell myself, ‘Hey, don’t worry about what others think,’” Ms Kusaini says.
She says: “I've learnt to take responsibility for my own healing. It will take time and I have to be patient with myself. Nothing meaningful ever comes easy. I have to come into terms with my own circumstances and respect myself enough to want to be better.”
