When I came to Yale, one of the first things I noticed was how much time people spend eating and planning meals. Throughout Camp Yale, my suitemates and I would plan out every detail of every meal together—where we’d meet each other, which dining hall we’d go to, what time we’d arrive.
Sometimes during dinner, we’d all be together, but none of us would talk. It was almost like the sheer presence of other bodies acted as a safety blanket. Even if we were alone, we could at least find comfort in the semblance of being together with other solo diners. After Camp Yale ended and our schedules stopped lining up, I began to eat alone. At first, the experience was strange. It felt wrong to be entirely alone when so much of college seems to revolve around meeting people, and it was difficult to listen to others’ conversations and not feel like the first person on Mars.
At Yale, loneliness is stigmatized outside of the dining halls on a daily basis. In many ways, Yale prizes a culture of constant socialization where students feel the need to network and add to their their social capital. The process of making friends becomes, at least in part, a game of strategy.
On weekend nights, the pervasive fear of being alone arises again when students go out to parties in the hopes of meeting new people. I don’t go to parties often, but from my limited experience, I’ve noticed a strange generic quality to social spaces at Yale. Despite an abundance of people gathering in one place, they appear simultaneously together and somehow still alone. In the mass of individuals at these parties, everyone starts to seem faceless. Each person fades into the next, attaining a physical closeness far from true togetherness. If I had to describe what loneliness looks like, it might be this.
And yet somehow the stereotypical images of loneliness at Yale are eating alone or sitting alone on a bench, both of which I enjoy doing regularly. But the next time I go by myself to Silliman to eat my breakfast of eggs and toast, I will not feel as alone as I would at a party, surrounded by people on every side. At Yale, we often think that if we are physically alone we are truly alone, but this is untrue. We try to boil down loneliness to the image of a solitary person, but in truth it is everywhere on this campus, especially in the places we wouldn’t think to look.