Neither Here Nor There: Loneliness Beyond Solitude
Exploring the hidden loneliness of never quite belonging anywhere.
This is part 1 of 7 in Neither Here Nor There: Loneliness, Belonging & Othering. You can read the series introduction here.
It’s been a while since I last wrote here regularly. Life, as it often does, has pulled me in many directions—but I’ve been working on something close to my heart. This is the beginning of a new series, Neither Here Nor There, an essay about loneliness, belonging, and the strange in-between spaces that have shaped me as a photographer.
Loneliness in the creative life is a familiar companion, often necessary, sometimes overwhelming. But there's a particular kind of loneliness that goes beyond the solitary hours spent writing, photographing, or making. It's the loneliness of never quite belonging anywhere, of carrying fragments of many places but being unable to call any single one home. This essay explores how a life shaped by movement and otherness—specifically as a Third Culture Kid—can give rise to both persistent loneliness and powerful creative expression.
Like many who live between worlds, I'm not looking for sympathy. There have certainly been moments when I've felt sorry for myself, but that's not what this is. It's more an attempt to understand the shape of something that's always walked beside me, and how that persistent sense of otherness has both hindered and fed my creative life. To ask why loneliness has followed me through life—it doesn’t ever arrive in a single, dramatic burst, but manifests as a subtle, shifting presence like a mist that swirls around you — at times so thick you can't see your way, at others so transparent, wraith-like it is almost invisible.
Loneliness, for me, has often been situational, rooted in movement, in being the new kid again and again, in having to learn a new map of meanings each time I arrived somewhere new. With a father who was enlisted in the Royal Air Force, and later worked in the emerging UK oil industry that had its base in Aberdeen, I was born in France, then moved to Kinloss in Scotland, Malta, County Durham and Suffolk in England, Aberdeenshire in Scotland… all by the age of nine. Each place wove something into me, but none of them offered a full pattern for life. I learned to adapt, but never belonged—and in that perpetual state of observing from the edges, I mastered the watchful stance that, I think, now defines my creative work.
As May Sarton once wrote, "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self."¹ I've known both; but the kind of loneliness I'm exploring here is more complicated. It's the loneliness of being unmoored, adrift from 'the crowd’, disconnected; of never quite answering the question "Where are you from?" without pausing.
What does it mean to grow up between worlds—and how does that invite not just a kind of loneliness, but a particular way of creating?
This first chapter sets the scene: loneliness not just as solitude, but as the ache of never quite belonging. Have you ever experienced a kind of loneliness that wasn’t about being alone, but about not belonging? How did it shape you? Next time, I’ll explore how language—and the loss of it—shaped the way I began to see the world.
Next instalment: Losing Language, Finding Voice.
¹ May Sarton (1912–1995) was a Belgian-American poet, novelist, and memoirist whose work often explored solitude, creativity, and the emotional lives of women. Her journals, especially Journal of a Solitude, have become touchstones for those navigating the tension between chosen isolation and uninvited loneliness.