People are often shocked when I tell them this: I never feel lonely.
This usually comes up when they learn I’ve been single for about thirty years. For many, it seems impossible to imagine that a woman could live on her own and be a fully realized, content, self-contained being. And yet—that’s exactly how I experience my life.
It hasn’t happened by accident. I’ve done a lot of deep work—years of resolving old wounds, facing sorrow, and learning how to truly like myself. That inner evolution created the foundation. But another piece, equally important, has been my fiction writing practice.
For me, fiction writing isn’t just about stories on the page. It’s about companionship, connection, and making meaning of life. It’s one of the reasons I live without loneliness, even in solitude.
Because I don’t feel the need for other people in my life—especially a partner, I’m liberated.
Writing Creates Connection
When you write fiction, you’re never truly alone. Characters come alive and keep you company. Over time, you know their voices, their quirks, their struggles. Some feel like friends. Some feel like family.
And the worlds you create become places you belong to. I’ve spent whole seasons of my life living in the worlds of my stories, and they’ve never failed to offer me comfort and belonging.
This is not to say that I’m disconnected from reality. I live a life that takes me out into the world and requires that I be in the company of others, but for short periods of time. For me, that’s plenty.
Writing Gives You a Voice
Loneliness often carries silence with it, a sense that no one is listening. Writing fiction cracks that silence open. It allows you to say the unsayable, to give voice to emotions that might be too heavy or vulnerable to speak aloud.
And when you give those feelings to a character, or shape them into a metaphor, you transform them. You create beauty out of pain.
In my experience, this not only purges pain, but it also leaves in its place a feeling of completion, which leads to peace.
Writing Becomes a Dialogue
Even when I’m alone at my desk, writing is never just a solitary act. It’s a dialogue with my imagination and my subconscious.
There’s also the awareness of a future reader, even if I never share the piece. That imagined presence means I’m always in conversation, never in isolation.
And when I take my stories out in public, whether I share them online or at an in-person reading, a dialogue is created from the story that leaves me with sparks of connection that remain.
Writing Grounds You in the Present
One of the things I love most about writing is the way time dissolves when I’m immersed in it. Hours pass like minutes. That flow state is powerful medicine. It connects me to something larger than myself.
I experience it as writing from deep within myself and far outside myself. It’s a way of connecting with the cosmos, the universe, the divine, and in doing that, I can never be alone.
And because writing has become a regular practice in my life, it functions almost like a ritual. Each time I return to the page, I return to a trusted companion.
Writing Builds Bridges to Others
Stories connect us across time, distance, and difference. Sharing my fiction has often led to surprising moments of resonance. Someone will say, “I saw myself in that,” or “I thought I was the only one who felt that way,” or “I’ve experience something similar before.”
That’s the beauty of writing fiction: it loosens loneliness not just for the writer, but for the reader too.
Even long after I’m gone, my words will remain, and they’ll connect my readers and me. I find comfort in knowing that.
Writing Helps You Make Meaning
The themes that run through fiction—love, loss, longing, hope—are universal. They remind us we’re part of a shared human story. When I write, I’m reminded that my solitude is not emptiness, but spaciousness.
And in fiction, I get to shape endings, imagine justice, create connection. That creative agency has helped me cultivate a life where I don’t feel the absence of partnership as a void, but as a chosen, fertile ground.
Knowing that I have created a life that feels full, a life that rests on me simply being—and writing—does not leave room for loneliness to grow.
A Note to Women
I think part of the surprise people express when they hear I’ve lived happily on my own for three decades comes from deeply ingrained cultural stories. Stories that tell women we’re incomplete without a partner. That our worth is tied to being chosen. That solitude must equal loneliness.
But here’s what I know: solitude can be sacred. It can be fertile, freeing, and deeply fulfilling.
Writing fiction has been one of the ways I’ve claimed and celebrated that truth. By creating characters, building worlds, and exploring human longing on the page, I’ve discovered profound companionship and meaning.
So if you’re a woman who has been told that being single—or even simply enjoying your own company—means something is missing, I invite you to consider another possibility: maybe nothing is missing. Maybe the stories you write, and the story you live, can be more than enough.
Sending you mad writing mojo…
Happy writing!
