Pathologically Genuine XI: Lonesome, I Know You Too Well

I don’t ignore the elephant in the room anymore. I don’t embrace it either. I accept that we share the space

1. Loneliness

Loneliness looms large in my life, to the point of being the elephant in the room I tried desperately to ignore. Like many autistic people, I often felt that I didn’t fit in. I was unable to form any romantic relationship with a woman until my late twenties. I felt — and probably was — rejected too many times. I did not have a sexual relationship until my mid-twenties, and that encounter ended with being laughed at for my lack of sexual prowess.

Eventually, I was able to build a couple of romantic relationships and have now been married for over twenty-five years to an extraordinarily patient spouse whom I love. But that hasn’t erased feelings of loneliness.

Shawn Mullins’ song Lonesome, I Know You Too Well captures the emotional emptiness I associate with loneliness. Unfortunately, like he sings, I know lonesome far too well (you can hear me sing the song here.

Lonesome, I know you too well
You ring in my ear, just like a bell
And you’re hollow like a dark empty well
Lonesome, I know you too well

Over time, I began to realize that my loneliness wasn’t simply about being alone. It had something to do with how I understood relationships — what I expected from them, what others expected from me, and how often those expectations quietly diverged. I didn’t yet have language for that difference, but I could feel its consequences.

Through my work as a pet therapy volunteer and board member at a school for autistic children, I learned that autistic people often struggle to understand the differences, and mutual expectations, between acquaintances, situational friends, and friends. These distinctions are explicitly taught in the school’s social skills curriculum.

Because I used work as a way to avoid rejection and the awkwardness of social interactions, I accumulated many situational friends and relatively few close ones. Those friendships were meaningful, and many remain connected to me. But situational friendships are fragile. When the situation changes, much of the relationship can disappear, and that loss can hurt.

Since I tended to move every four to seven years, I would form a new group of situational friends with each move and then lose many of them with the next. As I reflected on this pattern, I realized that the pain I felt often wasn’t proportional to what had actually been lost. Situational friendships ended as they naturally do, but I experienced their disappearance as rejection.

There are probably many reasons for my nomadic life. Some were undoubtedly related to being autistic and lonely. With each move, I hoped I would finally fit in. After about four years in any one place, loneliness and depression intensified, and moving felt like an energetic reset. Or perhaps it is more like ecological succession. In this metaphor, I might be a pioneer species moving into an empty space, but overtime perhaps my presence and actions in that space eventually make it unsuitable for me. So, I need to migrate.

That urge to reset didn’t stay confined to geography. It followed me into my professional life, where belonging felt easier to negotiate through roles and titles than through unstructured social connection. If I couldn’t reliably feel accepted as a person, perhaps I could feel accepted as a professional.

I was fairly narcissistic about moving. I assumed people would be happy for me as I pursued new opportunities, not realizing how my departures affected them. As a faculty member, moving is expected. As an administrator, it is not because in order to gain trust, one has to be more committed to the institution than to themselves. I was surprised when colleagues were angry when I left. This reaction that felt strange, but I suppose it was better than if they threw a “good riddance” parry.

I would thrive in new environments for a while, only to feel the need for another reset a few years later. Eventually, I came to appreciate the prescience of Jackson Browne’s lyric in Your Bright Baby Blues: “No matter how fast I run, I can’t get away from me.”
These days, I am contentedly stuck with myself on the shores of Lake Jeanette in Greensboro.

That same longing for acceptance shaped my career choices. One reason I sought my first administrative role — a one-year program officer position at the National Science Foundation — was the hope that it would make connection easier. I was deeply insecure about being accepted as a scientist and hoped the authority associated with the role would grant me legitimacy and seminar invites.

To some extent, it did. Scientists who had previously ignored me suddenly listened intently during grant site visits. I found this mildly amusing. But the job did not bring lasting connection, and once I left NSF, those situational friendships vanished almost immediately.

I had never aspired to be an academic administrator. I once thought administrators were suit-wearing villains. Even now, I instinctively distrust men in expensive suits and perfectly folded pocket squares. In fact, there is a negative correlation between dress and trust for me. The more casual somebody dresses, the more likely I am to trust them. At NSF, however, I discovered that being an administrator allowed me to facilitate the success of others, and that I was good at it. I pursued that path despite being ambivalent about the power it conferred. I liked being valued, even if it was the role being valued more than me.

What I did not understand then was that work wasn’t just helping me avoid social discomfort. It was also helping me avoid my emotions. Loneliness and emotional emptiness often traveled together, even when my life appeared full.

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2. Suppressing Emotions

Like many autistic people, I struggle with emotional regulation. For me, the challenge has been suppressing and ruminating on emotions rather than acting them out.

My emotions aren’t always available when I need them. At times, it feels as if they enrolled in an extraordinarily effective witness protection program.

Nature offers useful metaphors. Some species detect predators long before they are in danger and respond by hiding or becoming inactive. Emotional predators seem densely populated in my mind. When danger is sensed, my emotions retreat into the deep sediments of cognition, waiting for it to pass. During periods of depression, however, the danger never leaves, hovering like a stalled hurricane.

Even when my parents died, I struggled to find deep sadness. I felt some grief, but mostly emptiness — as if I were hollowed out like an old well. I loved my parents deeply and miss them a lot, and more and more with time. I did and still do grieve, but my grief remains emotionally stoic.

Most of the time, my emotions remain inaccessible. But there are two consistent exceptions.

Dogs.
You will only find me crying in a movie theater when a dog dies or is hurt. That rarely happens when people are hurt. Dogs that have bonded with me have reliably revealed emotions I otherwise struggle to access, allowing me to feel unconditional love when they are with me and deep sadness when they die.

Music.
I feel music deeply, especially acoustic music where a song, its lyrics, and the way it is sung create safety for buried emotions to emerge. A powerful example is Bonnie Raitt’s rendition of John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery, which never fails to unearth familiar pain. It is like a windstorm in the dust bowl exposing what lies beneath the surface. The chorus is:

Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing I can hold on to
To believe in this living is a hard way to go

For those of us who experience depression, that last two lines resonate like sound in an echo chamber.

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3. Are Loneliness and Emotional Suppression Connected?

Experiencing loneliness and emotional emptiness together made me wonder whether they were connected. I wanted to know whether this pairing was unique to me or reflected broader patterns.

The literature is extensive on loneliness in autistic children, but far thinner for middle-aged and older autistic adults¹. There is also substantial research on emotional regulation and suppression in autistic individuals²,³. What I found lacking was research explicitly connecting emotional suppression and loneliness.

I turned to ChatGPT, which confidently stated that emotional suppression is strongly linked to loneliness in autistic people, citing a dozen papers. Only one of those papers explicitly addressed that connection — a 2003 study⁴. When I pointed this out to ChatGPT, and asked it whether it could identify any newer research, it reluctantly told me that I made a good point.

It also then identified a 2025 meta-analysis of sixty-one studies⁵ showing statistically significant correlations between emotional suppression and loneliness, though the effect size explained only about nine percent of the variation in the data. The authors concluded that both ineffective (e.g., suppression) and effective (e.g., reassessing a situation) emotion regulation strategies were associated with loneliness, without establishing causation.

The study left open whether emotional suppression contributes to loneliness, whether loneliness leads to emotional suppression, or whether both reinforce each other.

Perhaps they form a feedback loop: emotional suppression leads to loneliness, which leads to more emotional suppression and more loneliness, etc., ultimately leading to deep depression and possibly suicide. In the darkest moments of my life, the positive feedback loop felt very real.

A 2025 study of young adults⁶ found that emotional suppression was associated with poorer romantic satisfaction and greater loneliness in females more than males, though males were not immune. At least one male. Me.

What struck me most in reviewing this research was its tentativeness and complexity— and how quickly those nuances disappeared when filtered through AI-generated certainty.

Research suggests autistic people experience deeper loneliness and higher suicide rates than non-autistic people, and that emotional suppression is more common. There is a relationship between the two, but not one strong enough to justify simple conclusions.

Research, though, doesn’t unlock my emotions. Music does. When data and analysis fail, songs help me find what is hidden.

Shawn Mullins, Jeff Black, and John Gorka articulate loneliness in ways that allow me to feel it without judgment.

Shawn Mullins — Lonesome, I Know You Too Well

Lonesome, I know you too well
You ring in my ear, just like a bell
And you’re hollow like a dark empty well
Lonesome, I know you too well

Jeff Black — Bless My Soul

I know why the day is long
When there is no one to talk to about my dreams
I know when the evening comes
That I will know the song of desire that the blackbird sings

John Gorka — Always

I will always be lonely
Nothing’s ever gonna change that
It’s the way that I am wired
It’s the way I’m set back

Shawn Mullins’ use of hollow captures how I experience loneliness. When I listen to that song, I can dredge up sadness and anger associated with being lonely. Those feelings can wrap around me like a blanket being comforting and uncomfortable at the same time.

Jeff Black’s song also resonates. Even with situational friends, I often had no one to talk to about dreams or emotions. That pain was most acute in the evenings and on weekends, when an empty house waited for me. I often filled that space by playing songs about loneliness on my guitar or piano. Those songs, metaphorically, helped me feel the longing and desire in a blackbird’s song.

John Gorka’s song, though, is rhythmically upbeat. It doesn’t unearth only negative emotion. Instead, it offers comfort in the idea that loneliness can exist without judgment or emptiness — simply as a way of being.

Loneliness may truly be the way I am wired, and the way I am set back. It has caused pain, but it has also fueled my drive. Those contradictions still feel strange.

I no longer try to eliminate loneliness. I acknowledge it. I don’t ignore the elephant in the room anymore. I don’t embrace it either. I accept that we share the space. Sometimes it demands attention so I’m not crushed by its weight. Oddly, it also provides comfort. Loneliness is one of the few things that has been with me for my entire adult life.

Postscript:

About 100 or so cormorants stopped at the Lake Jeanette rest stop. A flock of about a dozen gulls circled them as they rested in the water. Cormorants took turns raising out the water flapping their wings like people do when annoyed by a fly. After a few minutes, one cormorant took to the air, just inches above the water. One by one the other cormorants followed. The gulls also followed. I wish I had gotten a video.

It was nice to see the cormorants-- none summered on Lake Jeanette this last year.
The gulls hovering over the cormorants reminded me of a song I wrote in high school or college when going through one of too many episodes of loneliness and depression.

It is titled, Running from the Sky and I sing it here.
It's a long way home
When you have been on the road for so many years
It's along way home.
Just like a midwestern highway
that goes on forever
It's a long way home.

The hawks fly above
looking for their prey down below
When they see a weak one
they dive
The little ones scramble
They try to hide
But, the hawk seeks them out because
they come from the sky

It's a long way home.
When you've been living alone for so many years
There are so many hawks in the sky
waiting to dive
It is a long way home,
when you are running from the sky

You're running on empty
right into the wall
You try to climb it but the ropes won't hold
You learn to lose
Forget how to choose
The hawk start to dive and you as yourself "why?"

It's a long way home,
when you are running from the sky
It's a long way home,
when you are running from yourself

Yeah, it’s a long way home, when you are running from yourself

References

¹Grace K, Remington A, Brynmore L-E, Davies J, Crane L. 2022. Loneliness in autistic adults: A systematic review. Autism. 26: 2117-2135 https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221077

² Cai RY, Richdale AL, Dissanayake C, Troller J, Uljarević M. 2018. Emotion regulation in autism: Reappraisal and suppression interactions. Autism 23: 737-749 https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318774

³McDonald RG, Cargill MI, Khawar S, Kang E. 2024. Emotion dysregulation in autism: A meta-analysis. Autism 28: 2986-300. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241257605

⁴Gross JJ, John OP. 2003. Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85: 348–362.

⁵Patrichi, A., Rîmbu, R., Miu, A. C., & Szentágotai-Tătar, A. (2025). Loneliness and emotion regulation: A meta-analytic review. Emotion, 25(3), 755-774. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001438

⁶Karababa, A. 2025. Suppression of Positive and Negative Emotions and Loneliness among Emerging Adults: A Moderated-Mediation Model of Romantic Relationship Satisfaction and Gender. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied. 159: 705-728. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2025.2466100