Consider the following comments on loneliness.
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
Mother Teresa
Loneliness is the human condition. No one is going to fill that space.
Janet Fitch
We are never so alone as in a crowd that knows our name but not our heart.
Solitude is the loneliness we choose, and in choosing it we strip it of its sting.
Some people are not lonely because they are without company, but because they have never been truly seen.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis worth exploring is that loneliness is less about the absence of people than the absence of being understood, so a person can be crowded and starving at once. Open by distinguishing it from solitude, which is loneliness made bearable because it was chosen. Then develop the quieter ache of the unseen self, the loneliness that survives a full diary and a busy phone. A second move might admit that some isolation is the price of refusing to perform a version of ourselves others find easier to love. Caution: avoid the tidy resolution that loneliness is simply cured by company, since the loneliest hours are often spent among people who do not know us at all.