Lauren, Luca and Mink on loneliness
‘Fitting in isn’t belonging’
Door Ingrid Ştefan
By Ingrid Ştefan
Ingrid Ştefan
Lauren
The first thing Lauren does every morning when she wakes up in her studio apartment is go on TikTok. She sets it to auto-scroll and goes about her day, cooking, cleaning, or doing assignments. ‘Now that I don’t have a family to wake me up, I wake up to TikTok’, says the second-year media student. ‘I love having that background noise, it feels like I’m not alone.’
For her, it’s a way to cope with loneliness, a feeling that’s constantly in the back of her mind. ‘TikTok is my buddy, the escape from my own madness.’ That ‘madness’ is a mix of isolation and lack of belonging that slowly makes her depressed and ultimately has her wondering why she’s here and whether she made a mistake moving to the Netherlands.
Crying sessions
The feeling first hit Lauren in November of her first year, just after the exam period. ‘All my friends had gone home, but I couldn’t go back to Saudi Arabia, because it was too expensive’, she says. ‘I ended up having a lot of crying sessions. It felt like Covid all over again.’
My friends and I can’t meet more than once a week
It’s not just the absence of friends that makes her feel lonely, though. It’s also how rarely they meet, and how meticulously planned everything has to be. ‘Most of my friends live outside Groningen, so we can’t meet more than once a week. I miss that spontaneity.’
Then, there’s the problem of connecting to others because of cultural barriers. Lauren is culturally mixed and was born in Australia, lived mostly in Saudi Arabia, but also attended a British high school, which makes her pretty detached from any particular cultural identity.
‘Here, culture is a big part of everyone’s personality’, Lauren says. And many students resonate with each other because of that, she thinks. ‘But for me, it’s hard to find people with a similar background.’
High school
She recalls discussing this with two guys who attended the same high school as her and are now studying in Amsterdam. ‘One of them asked me if I ever felt like I couldn’t connect to people in uni as I could in high school. I feel very much like that.’
On the one hand, she knows it’s because back then, everyone had the same life. On the other, she wishes people wouldn’t put so much emphasis on cultural identity. ‘Let’s just be kids trying to figure out uni together.’
Luca Bachiri
Luca Bachiri, a third-year physics student from America, moved to Groningen in 2022 with one goal: he was going to have a social life. It wasn’t going to be like in high school, when he was self-isolating a lot, spending hours on platforms like Twitch and YouTube without daring to interact with people, or playing video games with his surface-level friends on Discord. ‘College will be different’, he thought to himself.
But six months into the first year, while biking on a random February afternoon, it hit him: ‘I’m doing the same things I always have. I didn’t change one bit.’ He now calls it an ‘epiphany’.
‘I was content, but something was missing from my life. The most depressing realisation was that I didn’t have any close friends.’ Though his social network has grown since, the loneliness has never quite gone away.
Yearning
‘It’s like a mental chronic pain, always in the background, but sometimes it flares up’, he explains. ‘Or to put in other terms, it’s like a yearning for something meaningful, yet it’s kind of ephemeral because it’s hard to satisfy.’ Going out for a drink in a bar won’t do it, but going to a friend’s house might.
It’s like a mental chronic pain, always in the background
Two years ago, when he first acknowledged his loneliness, Luca embarked on a journey to understand where that was coming from. ‘I realised a few things were holding me back. There was the baseline feeling of desiring meaningful connections. But there was also a level of social anxiety and low self-esteem.’
They all feed into each other, he thinks, so he slowly started working on them and even went to the student psychologist. ‘But Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ And while he has more close friends now, less anxiety and a lot more confidence, he still feels lonely regularly.
Invisible barrier
‘For me, it’s the lack of comfort within an environment, which is linked to vulnerability’, he explains. He also has high standards for people that make it hard to resonate with others. ‘Maybe my brain’s attaching itself to dissimilarities because it feels comfortable doing that. There’s this invisible barrier which prevents me from feeling truly connected to someone.’
He misses the feeling of being part of a group, too. ‘I can fit in, but that’s different from belonging.’ That’s also why he’s not a fan of student associations.
‘I can go through the steps of fitting in, but how many people would care if I left?’
Luca did find a way around that, though. Last year, he set up his own book club for music enthusiasts. ‘The idea behind it was just putting an online space offline’, he says. That helped with the sense of belonging, yet it’s still ‘finicky’, because people with similar interests don’t necessarily have matching energies. ‘Even so, it’s a fun outlet. I think there should be more cool clubs like that.’
Mink Berg
Mink Berg has a very active social life. The third-year chemistry student is both a member of his study association and a dance association and runs around from event to event. He dances three to four times a week and he almost always has an activity planned for the evening.
Yet when he gets home, loneliness creeps up on him. ‘Right before I go to sleep, it hits me that nothing’s happening, and there’s no one to interact with’, he says. ‘It’s fleeting, but a bit isolating.’ He’s come to accept the feeling, but he had to do quite a lot of work to get here.
Unsure
Mink has always been the type of person who craves a lot of social interaction. When he moved to Groningen and met his girlfriend, that was easy to satisfy, because she was always there. But when they broke up a year ago, that craving got really bad. And he wasn’t really used to approaching new people.
I used to think that maybe they didn’t want to talk to me
‘I wouldn’t say I was anxious, just unsure about interacting with others’, he says. ‘I used to get into my own head and think that maybe they didn’t want to talk to me or didn’t have time to do so.’
What changed his mind was a random conversation he had with someone he can’t even remember. ‘He told me that by not initiating contact I’m hindering myself when I really need that social interaction, but I’m also hindering the other person, who might think the same. And that if I’m the first person to break through the barrier, it takes away both weights.’
Hardest step
It’s like a switch was flipped. He decided it was time to put himself out there more. Student associations helped him a lot with that. ‘At a Christmas party during my first year, I was feeling a bit lonely, but then one of the board members remembered my name and I thought: “I matter”.’
It made him feel recognised as part of that group, which gave him more confidence and ultimately led to more interaction. ‘There’s a mental barrier there, but if you get past it, that’s already the hardest step’, he thinks. ‘For me, it wasn’t that I didn’t have a social network, I just talked myself into believing that.’