Finding Home: Loneliness, Community and the In-Between Spaces
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
Guest blog by Iva Dragostinova is a counsellor based in the UK, working with themes of identity, belonging and intersectionality. Her work is shaped by her own experience of growing up between cultures and countries.
Loneliness is not always what it looks like.
We picture it as a person sitting alone at a table. An empty chair. A phone that doesn't ring. But some of the loneliest moments of my life happened in rooms full of people.
I know this because I have lived it. More than once. In more than one country. In more than one language.
When the room feels like a foreign country
I moved to Finland as a child. I didn't speak the language. I didn't understand what was happening around me.
But children adapt. I sat in the classroom and I drew. Page after page, while the words around me remained out of reach. I drew until the language came. Drawing and gestures were my way in. And somewhere in that silent adaptation, I learned how to exist in a room without truly belonging to it.
Years later, a Finnish friend found me on Facebook. She told me that my friendship had helped her feel less lonely, even after I left. Even after I had forgotten the language entirely, that whole chapter sealed off, like it belonged to a different version of me.
I hadn't known. But the connection had mattered anyway. Across decades. Across continents. Across a language I no longer speak.
She has since visited Bulgaria, my place of birth, and tells me it is now one of her favourite places. Connection has a long reach.
Later, we moved to the UK. I was a preteen. I spoke the language. I had done this before. In theory, I had everything I needed to belong.
And I still couldn't fit.
That second loneliness was harder. Because I couldn't blame the language barrier. This time, the problem felt like me.
I learned to scan every room I walked into. Read the people, get a sense of the atmosphere. Become whatever I felt I needed to be to integrate as quickly as possible. Walk in. Scan. Read. Become.
I became very good at it. Almost automatic. I didn't have the words for it then. But I was learning to live in the in-between spaces, existing between who I was and who I needed to be in each room.
The loneliness lived in my body as a tight feeling in my solar plexus. A shakiness. A quivering voice when I was the only one speaking, as though emotion would fail my mask at any moment.
When people asked where I was from, I said “London”.
The real answer was too long and complicated. Too much. And somewhere along the way I had learned that my full story was more than people wanted to hear.
The loneliness nobody sees
Years later, I went through IVF.
On paper, I had a support network. People who loved me. People who wanted to help.
It was one of the most isolating experiences of my life.
Because nobody could really go there with me. The waiting. The hoping. The grief. The difficult emotions nobody warned me about. The way it reshapes your relationships, your future, your sense of self.
This is the loneliness that doesn't get named. The kind that exists not because people aren't there, but because no one on the outside can fully find their way in.
I was living in the in-between. Somewhere unnamed, with no map.
What living in the in-between spaces does to you
During my counselling training, we did an exercise where we shared three things about our past. When I started speaking, I felt the emotion rise. The familiar tightness in my solar plexus. The shaky voice. I stopped myself.
“I want to tell my story without the feelings and crying,” I said.
Even in a room full of trainee therapists, trained specifically to hold emotion, I was still editing myself. Still trying to tell the story as though it hadn’t affected me.
That's what loneliness does over time. It teaches you to filter, to minimise, to perform a version of yourself that feels more acceptable.
To say “London” instead of the full complicated truth.
And the cost of that filtering is connection itself.
What actually helped
It wasn't one moment. It wasn't one person. It was in reflection that I began to own the full story rather than the edited one.
Seeing the masking for what it was. Recognising what I had been doing to feel safe.
Belonging didn't arrive from outside. It grew from inside when I stopped filtering myself.
And I found it in community.
Years before I became a counsellor, I volunteered at a mental health community group. I went because I wanted to help. And because I needed community myself. Both things were true.
Each session began with drumming. No words. No plan. No hierarchy. Nobody would have known who was there to help and who was there to be helped. Only sound, and people, and whatever happened next.
The joy was in being. Unrehearsed. Unplanned. Just people, just sound.
Smiles. Bodies moving. People present in a way that loneliness rarely allows.
I have never forgotten it.
The loneliness of later life
In my therapy room I sit with people who are still editing their story, giving the shorter, guarded answer. Performing a version of themselves that feels safer to present to the world.
I recognise it because I did it too.
And I sit with people in a particular kind of loneliness that doesn't get talked about enough, the loneliness of later life.
People spend decades defining themselves by their work, the contribution they make to the world around them. And then retirement arrives, the thing they looked forward to, the freedom they imagined, and the first question that surfaces is: who am I now?
The structure is gone. The daily purpose that felt so ordinary is suddenly deeply missed.
Loneliness in later life is real. And not enough spaces exist that speak directly to it. Not enough events say: you are welcome here, exactly as you are.
A room where someone is pleased to see you
Janice Moth founded The Glamour Club on a mission to end loneliness in Worthing and beyond. Vintage themed events, afternoon tea, live music, dancing, singing, people watching. Guests greeted at the door and escorted to their tables.
I volunteered at one of her events. I set up the room, welcomed people in, served tea, sandwiches and cake. I connected with fellow volunteers. Guests arrived, dressed up, together, showing up fully. Everyone connected.
There was beauty in the small moments. A smile from someone as I handed them their tea. A thank you that meant more than words. Brief exchanges with people I had never met and might never see again. No backstory required. Presence. Warmth. Humans in the same room being kind to each other.
After years of scanning rooms and performing belonging, the simplicity of it was extraordinary.
I loved being a part of it. The dance, the laughter, the belonging.
Because this is what Janice built, not just an event, but a pioneering movement. A space where showing up is enough. Where a cup of tea, a favourite song and someone genuinely pleased to see you can change the shape of a month. Of a life.
That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone refused to look away from loneliness and decided to do something about it.
We have more in common than divides us
Jo Cox said it in her maiden speech in Parliament. She said it because she believed it. She was murdered for her beliefs. Ten years on, her legacy continues through the Jo Cox Foundation and The Great Get Together, events that bring communities together in her name.
The Marmalade Trust, founders of Loneliness Awareness Week, carry the same conviction. That loneliness is not a personal failing. That it is human, that it's not shameful. That it can become a place of connection if we create the right conditions.
I wrote publicly about my IVF experience recently. It was the first time I had spoken about it in years. It made me cry. And it reached people I will never meet who needed to feel less alone.
Trailblazers don't always shout. Sometimes, they just stop saying “London”.
Coming home
I am a BACP registered counsellor working in Worthing and online. I support people living in the in-between spaces, the gap between the life they imagined and the life they are living.
The intersectionality of culture, identity and life experience informs everything I bring to this work. The in-between spaces where I live are where I’ve learned to understand people.
But before I was a counsellor, I was a child who didn't speak Finnish. A preteen who still couldn't fit even when I spoke the language. A woman going through IVF in a room full of people who loved me and still felt completely alone.
And I found my way to feeling less alone by leaning into those experiences and finding community.
It took me a long time to stop saying “London”.
But when I did, I found that the full story, the complicated, in-between story that doesn’t fit neatly, was the thing that connected me most deeply to others.
You don't need a simple origin story to belong.
You just need a room where someone is pleased to see you.
People and connection are what makes a place feel like home to me.
