We Weren’t Built To Do This Alone

By: Tamara Gestetner

I was talking to my brother (one of our more serious conversations) and he said something that actually made me think. We’re not meant to do life alone.

My first reaction wasn’t total agreement. It was something closer to defensiveness. Because there are entire seasons of my life where alone is the only thing that’s felt safe, and the idea of one more person needing something from me, even something as small as my attention, made me want to lock the door and not answer it.

I’ve told myself that’s healthy. Boundaries. Self-protection. I say those words to clients all the time and I mean it. But if I’m honest, sometimes it isn’t boundaries. Sometimes it’s just fear wearing a more respectable outfit.

Here’s the thing I don’t say publicly very often: I’m a therapist. I’ve built a career on the idea that people heal in connection, that isolation is where wounds calcify, and I believe that with my whole being. And still there are nights I sit in my own house doing the exact thing I’d gently challenge a client for doing. Going quiet. Not answering the text. Telling myself I’ll reach out tomorrow, and tomorrow becomes next week. Knowing better doesn’t make you immune; it just means you recognize the pattern faster, which isn’t the same as stopping it.

I think about the version of me that used to believe that needing people was a kind of defeat. Somewhere along the way I absorbed the notion that the strongest people in the room were the ones who didn’t need anyone to hold them up, and for years I mistook that for maturity. I got good at being the one who shows up for everyone else. The one people called. It took me a long time to notice that being needed and being known aren’t the same thing, and I’d built an entire identity around one so I didn’t have to risk the second.

So, when my brother said that sentence, some part of me wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say, “You don’t understand, sometimes alone is the only place I don’t have to perform. Alone doesn’t ask me to be okay. Alone doesn’t need me to have answers.” But he wasn’t talking about an evening to myself. He was talking about the deeper thing, the pattern beneath it, the place where alone stops being about relaxation and starts to be about retreating. And I think he saw something in me that I hadn’t said out loud yet, not even to myself, not really.

Take my guest Yehudah Pryce. He spent sixteen years in prison, starting at 19-years-old. Nineteen. When I asked him what saved him when he got out, I braced myself for the answer I usually get: therapy, discipline, some private reckoning behind bars that turned him around. He didn’t say any of those. He talked about Shabbos meals. Strangers asking him if he had a place to eat on a Friday night. Not once in the 16 years he was in prison had anyone ever asked him that. Not once had a single person ever invited him to dine simply because he existed. And here’s the part that grabs me the most. He told me he didn’t necessarily want to be found. Not at first. Prison teaches you that needing people is a liability, that trust gets you hurt, that the safest version of yourself is the one nobody can reach. He had to be pulled back into needing people. He described it as uncomfortable before it was ever healing. Nobody warns you about that part. We talk about community like it’s a warm blanket. Sometimes it’s closer to a hand pulling you out of water you’d started getting used to, water you told yourself you were fine in.

That’s what I don’t think we say enough. Community doesn’t always feel good going in. Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon are built almost entirely around that discomfort, a room full of strangers who make you say the things out loud that you’ve spent a lifetime learning to carry silently, because silent and alone felt safer even while it was destroying you. Nobody walks into their first meeting wanting to be there. They walk in because being alone stopped working, because the thing they were protecting by staying isolated turned out to be the very thing that kept them sick. I think about how many people sit in a waiting room or a pew or a parked car outside a meeting they’re not sure they want to attend, telling themselves they can handle this on their own, the same lie that so many of us tell ourselves more times than we’d like to admit.

I was reading recently about Amish communities, how they live longer and get sick less, and the piece researchers kept circling back to was that nobody there disappears. Nobody gets old or sick or disappears from view in the Amish world the way so many of us do here in our world even though we live a few feet from our neighbors, completely unseen.

I don’t think we take loneliness seriously enough as an actual health crisis, not just an uncomfortable feeling. In 2023 the Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness in this country, and the numbers behind that declaration are staggering. About 50% of American adults report measurable loneliness. The mortality impact is on par with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and worse than the impact of obesity or a sedentary lifestyle. Social isolation raises the risk of heart disease by nearly a third and the risk of stroke by even more. Among older adults, it raises the risk of dementia by roughly half. We are, quite literally, not built for isolation. From the very beginning, community wasn’t a social preference, it was survival. A person alone in the wilderness didn’t make it. A person alone today doesn’t make it either though they may have all the comforts.

I don’t think the answer is that solitude is the enemy. I still want it. Some weeks I need it more than I need another conversation, another person at my table. There’s a kind of quiet that restores you and a kind that isolates you, and learning to tell them apart might be the actual work, more than choosing one over the other. Wanting to be alone and being built to survive alone are not the same thing even though they can feel identical from the inside. One is a need. The other is a habit born out of a need to survive, but makes for a very limited kind of life.

My brother wasn’t telling me anything new. He was just saying out loud something I already knew and had been avoiding looking at directly. The same way people showed up for Yehudah whether he wanted them to or not, the same way community keeps showing up for the rest of us even when we’re trying to avoid togetherness—because on some level, people understand that we don’t really mean it when we push them away. That’s the true chesed, honestly. That people keep asking even after you’ve said no a few times. And someone keeps texting you even when you’ve gone quiet. And somewhere there’s a table with room for you even during the times you’ve convinced yourself you don’t belong there.

So maybe the challenge this week isn’t complicated (but I won’t pretend it’s comfortable either). Notice the person you’ve been keeping at arm’s length, the one who has reached out to you more than once and then went quiet. This time, let them in. Even if part of you would rather stay alone. Especially then. Because the version of you that allows them in might be closer to who you actually are than the one who’s gotten so used to managing alone. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.