At what stage in your life have you felt was the loneliest?...... We all feel lonely at some stage,but,did you ever feel isolated in your solitude that it effected your self-esteem ext....

16-17 was rough. Since then I haven't felt anything near that extreme aloneness.

I think mine would be my early 20's. I was working shift work and living at home. My life was just work and home. I didn't really have any friends that I socialised with outside of work and I didn't really have much in the way of gay friends (don't think I had any really) and I was very in the closet and very afraid of doing anything with a guy.

I guess right now is a difficult period of my life.I have always felt somewhat alone and an outsider but I guess earlier periods I was either living at home or house sharing and had someone in my life though they always lived away....it made it somewhat habitable.

I'm kinda the same to be honest..The worst period coulda been 5-7 years ago when I was struggling to come out etc but I had Gaire to make me not feel lonely.

I'm not lonely.
To the contrary, I desire to be alone.
The older I get the more reclusive I become.
I can go days without speaking to another person.
Bliss.

Like Kevsamo I often desire to be alone too. I have A.S. but there is also a strong side of me that doesn't want to be alone. So there is an inner struggle going on in my brain. I like limited company but get sensory overload if too much is going on. It's part of the autistic character of A.S. When I was 12 at first I felt these reclusive tendencies were starting to go away but then something happened in school and they returned 100-fold. In terms of what period was loneliest I would say from 1992-2005 (the year I met non-Gaire Colm). He was sort of enough for me until the friendship ended in 2011. It was a cuddlefest and he was constantly around to cheer me up (he was at my Dads funeral too). He was much part of my life so when he was no longer around I went back to a more lonely frame of mind. I still think about him every day.

I have sortof come around to a line of thinking a friend of my mothers (now deceased) told me, which is that your best friend is yourself.

Most days, I'm afraid!

Just before I turned forty I was engulfed with clinical depression and spent months in hospital....At the time it felt like the loneliest place in the world...I felt lost both in my mind,body and heart.....As a result of this experience I feel stronger and now rarely use "lonely" to describe times when I am own my own......I feel it is important to deliberately take time for myself and do not feel guilty doing so....

Sometimes those periods of raw pain and darkness can open the door to a brighter and more illuminating stage in life,to a greater understanding of ourselves.

How true. But I still rather be the happy content me I am now, I think I'm all pained out.

I am trying to deal with my pain now, this for me is the darkest part of my life,i am encouraged when i read that others have made it and are now happy and content now.I have been a fool for along time in my life and this is like an awakening, i have slipped, fallen and am still trying to claw my way back to my happy place but it is extremly hard and painfull.

It can be an incredibly hard journey, HonestJoe - and I'm still on it. I wouldn't be this far a long if it wasn't for Gaire.

Thanks Man, i can be a bloody mess at times, and find it has started effecting my work, i need to focus on the good things and try to stay positive, but it is very hard, my mind keeps slipping back into extream sadness, i even have tryed drinking lots, but this makes me feel really bad the following day. But anyways i continue looking for my happy place where ever it may be? Sometimes i curl up in the corner of a room and just cry so hard, but look, i will be strong like the rest of the guys on here someday. i know it.

This sounds a lot like me up until 6 months / a year ago.