“As A Child, I Had Trouble Forming Friendships, And Turned Instead To Fantasy. I Could Imagine Myself

“As a child, I had trouble forming friendships, and turned instead to fantasy. I could imagine myself into the books I read and, by embellishing the characters, supply myself with precisely the sorts of friends that I’d always longed for. If you have engaged in this kind of fantasizing, you know that the thrill of creativity eventually collapses into a feeling of emptiness. This is the moment when loneliness hits. You’ve prepared yourself an elaborate psychological meal, and you realize, belatedly, that it can never sate your real hunger.”

— Agnes Callard, from “The Problem with Marital Loneliness,” The New Yorker (25 September 2021)