I Work From Home and I Haven't Had a Real Conversation in Three Months.

I know how this sounds. I work from home, I set my own hours, I don't have a commute. I should be grateful. I am grateful. I'm also the loneliest I've ever been in my life.

I moved to a new city for a relationship that ended eight months ago. My job went fully remote the same month. So now I live alone in a city where I don't know anyone, and my entire social life is a Slack channel and a weekly team call where my camera is always off.

I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I noticed I was narrating things out loud to myself. Like, out loud. Just to hear a voice.

I found Silent Battles through someone I follow online who shared one of the posts. I read the whole site in one sitting. I kept thinking: someone wrote this for me specifically. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way where you recognize yourself in something and feel less like a freak for being the way you are.

The thing that helped most was just having language for it. Remote work loneliness. That's a real thing. It has a name. It's not just me being bad at adulting or ungrateful for my situation. It's a real, documented, genuinely hard thing that is happening to a lot of people and nobody is talking about honestly.

I turned my camera on in a meeting last week. First time in months. Nobody said anything. But I felt it. The tiny, fragile feeling of being seen.

Small steps. That's all this is. Small steps.

→ Read the guide that named it: Camera Off — A Guide to Remote Work Loneliness