Welcome to Issue 2 of Cause & Effect, a zine project I conducted in 2015. If you missed Issue I, here it is.
Briefly, the purpose of Cause & Effect was to talk to people about loneliness—if and how they experienced it and how they dealt with it. Interviewees were kept anonymous but that did not always prove to be sufficient to ease people’s comfort with having their story appear in print—this issue is case in point. The output of the conversations was in the form of palm-sized zines distributed in public spaces throughout my neighbourhood and the city via myself and friends.
Two people speaking on July 30, 2015. My words are italicized, the interviewee’s aren’t.
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—3 lines redacted—
“You feel frustrated.”
—3 lines redacted—
“So, is this all connected to the —word redacted— breaking down?”
—2 lines redacted—
“You feel lonely because…”
—2 lines redacted—
“Depression, I think, is more advanced than loneliness, because you can feel lonely but not be depressed.”
—2 lines redacted—
“Lonely or depressed?”
—2 lines redacted—
“Is this because you’re driving home? Or because you’re leaving an activity that kept you busy and you enjoyed?”
—2 lines redacted—
“What does that mean? So, you want to go out with somebody for a walk but you don’t want them to talk?”
—2 lines redacted—
“So you have friends that basically…”
—1 line redacted—
“She’s like an acquaintance perhaps?”
—1 line redacted—
“I see, it’s a neighbourly relationship.”
—3 lines redacted—
“So, she must be lonely.”
—1 line redacted—
“Does she live on her own?”
—1 line redacted—
“She must be lonely too because I think people that do that are lonely.”
—8 lines redacted—
Maybe he was depressed.
So, I’ve been doing a bit of research on loneliness, and one researcher says that loneliness is when you’re feeling a lack of connection, and you have this need, a need to connect. And he said that loneliness, is like thirst and hunger, in that when you’re hungry you go for food to take care of that, when you’re thirsty you go for water, when you’re lonely your body is telling you that you are feeling a lack of connection. So how do you cure it? Well, with loneliness it’s more complicated than thirst and hunger. He mentioned that doing some type of volunteer work, the type where you are helping other people, because then other people are very appreciative of your help, and seeing their appreciation makes you feel good.
—5 lines redacted—
“So she’s always very helpful when you get in touch with her.”
—3 lines redacted—
“So it makes you feel less frustrated.”
—2 lines redacted—
“It seems to come back to that thing of having somebody to discuss things with. Like when I come home, I always have Lenny and I can run things by him.”
—6 lines redacted—
“Right, there’s no one to call.”
“Do you call any body?”
—3 lines redacted—
“You don’t want a friendship where people all they feel like doing is complaining? Yeah, it’s nice to talk about different things when you meet somebody.”
—1 line redacted—
“So you feel you don’t have people you can call, you don’t have any friends, people that you know just talk about their problems.”
—2 lines redacted—
“Because she just talked about herself the whole time?”
—5 lines redacted—
“Then what do you do when you feel lonely?”
—1 line redacted—
“But what do you do when you feel you need human contact?”
—1 line redacted—
“Yeah, well that’s good. It’s one way of dealing with it. It’s a matter though of having a book you can get lost in. But I think you still need human connection. I don’t think you can say you don’t have anyone to call and they you say…”
—2 lines redacted—
“But you said ‘I don’t want any friends.’ Do you really not want any friends?”
—2 lines redacted—
“Sometimes people take their experiences from the past, that were negative, and all their present actions are informed by their past experiences. Which in this case, yeah, you’ve learned that people have taken advantage but then this is actually stopping you from considering that you might make a friend.”
—1 line redacted—
“It’s like you’re sabotaging your own opportunity to make friends. It’s something to think about. But also as you said, when you’re lonely you have to be careful because some bad people do take advantage. Sometimes people are needy and don’t realize they’re being taken advantage of.”
—1 line redacted—
“I guess what I’m saying is that you have a very negative view of the possibility of making friends.”
—3 lines redacted—
“I think, how you think can really affect what kind of interaction you’re going to have with somebody.”
/end of conversation/content in the zine/
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Email received:
From: Interviewee
To: Me
Subject: here is what I think about my personal view about loneliness
Date: September 6, 2015
—Content redacted—
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Backstory and Post-Interview
I was unsure about this interview but, ultimately I had published it because it presented one person’s unique challenges.
First, I have to admit that I felt I did not allow enough time for the interview and also that I could have set up a better interview environment—I think now, several years later, this conversation would have gone better in a small group setting. I was actually hoping that the encounter would be more of a conversation rather than an interview. But as our time together unfolded, I realized this would be an interview. There was an expectation for clear questions to be answered. Perhaps that’s OK, you have to understand your subject, the situation, and make the best of it.
After the interview I felt really frustrated. Admittedly, we know each other well and sometimes piss each other off.
A couple of months after the interview, I produced Issue 2 of Cause & Effect presenting the interview in its entirety. Then, in the fall of 2015, I was able to participate at the Vancouver Art/Book Fair and was happy to see people show an interest in reading these zines about loneliness (I had only Issue 1 and 2 at that time).
After the fair, the interviewee asked how many copies sold. Almost all! Only one was left and none of Issue 1. ‘Oh, so mine wasn’t as popular,’ they said.
Months later—well into the following year, they were over for a visit. It was about ten thirty at night and we were standing outside my building. They must have been chewing on this because next thing, they asked me not to distribute the zine anymore. I asked, even if it’s completely anonymous? They said it wasn’t done properly; it did not reflect who they were…or something to that effect. But from my point of view, it reflected very well who they were and how they felt a lot of the time. It was a revealing snapshot of their thought processes, but, most importantly, it was a valuable opportunity for others to be privy to someone else’s experience of loneliness and its causes.
I obliged. No problem.
(At this time, I was also experiencing frustration from complications with the participant of Issue 3, so I was starting to feel exasperated. This project is doomed to fail, I thought. It is too hard to deal with lonely people!)
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the evening. They proceeded to belittle the project. They said, it’s just a little project, it’s nothing, who is going to read it? I don’t remember exactly everything they said, but that stung.
A few days later they tried to take ‘it’ back. And then they said that we could talk about it.
No thanks. That’s fine.
Complicated? Yes.
So as per their request, I pulled the zine from circulation and that is why now Issue 2 appears in its new redacted form. I have wrestled with totally erasing this issue from any future projects but, at the moment, I have arrived at this presentation instead. It’s proof of an exchange, albeit, one fraught with complications, but perhaps, also a reminder of a job I wasn’t prepared for. It is an example of how complex human beings can become when deeply caught up in the pain of loneliness. There is a part in our brain, called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that is activated when one feels physical pain. It turns out, emotional pain activates the same spot. This means that emotional pain is distressing to our body just as physical pain is. It puts us into fight or flight mode and consequently, it can cause or exacerbate health issues. Researchers go as far as to say that “loneliness could hasten death in sick people.”1
Presented as it is here, this piece is now also about my experience doing this project. But you know, I may still delete all of this in the future.
[Update: April 24, 2022 - performed slight edits.]
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Thanks for reading. Next week I’ll share Issue 3 of this project and the post-interview experience. ~ Laura
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P.S. Dear Reader, May I ask you a favour? If you’re reading this and found it interesting or thought provoking in any way, would you give me a ‘heart’? This is as simple as clicking the heart icon at the bottom of this page. Although, I can access statistics on ‘opens’ and ‘link clicks’ somehow a clicked heart icon is more ‘real’ proof that someone is actually reading these words. Of course, comments are super welcome too! Thank you!
There are many journal articles on this research but one that is easy to read is The Lethality of Loneliness by Judith Shuvelitz in The New Republic magazine, May 27, 2013.