Alonement is back!

Meanwhile, I'm living my fantasy life in Lisbon (again).

First thing’s first: my podcast Alonement, an interview show about alone time and why it matters to my guests, has returned with Season 10. It was an honour to have award-winning comedian/proud self-proclaimed cat lady Katie Norris as my first guest. You can listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts – and please do leave a review because occasionally I really care about that kind of thing late at night (plus it helps us get discovered, etc etc).

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Now! Hello from Lisbon, the hot affair I’ve been coming back to since October 2022, the month I published my first issue of The Shoulds. Since then, I’ve done five long stints here, stretching my visa-free Schengen allowance to the limit. Schengen aside, I’m lucky enough to be able to work mostly remotely. I’m also lucky that my close friend and fellow Substacker

Lauren Clark

, lives here and has welcomed me into the expat community she’s built over the past five years, since she was brave enough to move here during the pandemic.

On the subject of bravery, Lisbon is where I come when I want permission to live the way I want. I take professional risks: I started the newsletter here, I started writing fiction here, and this time around I was here as I hit the ‘Publish’ button on Season 10 of my podcast Alonement. I dress in brighter colours and show more skin. I go to in-person writing mornings at a local bookshop. I do more yoga. I comfort-eat less (and possibly drink more wine, but it’s hard not to when it’s €3-4 a glass). I’m funnier, I think – or at least I make the jokes I usually make in my head outside of my head. And I’m calmer, because it’s hard not to be when the pace of the city, paved with slippery calçada tiles, dictates that you slow down.

What am I doing here? Simply put, I’m cheating on London. I think it’s just a fling, a hot affair, but I can’t be certain yet. If I’m honest, I’ve felt stagnant recently, in my 20-year-long marriage with my beloved home city. I love it, but it feels like, for so long, I’ve been waiting for something to happen that never bloody does. The professional high, the whirlwind romance, the creative epiphany or the cosy, content life that eludes me. In London, I feel abnormal; existentially burnt out by never having a good answer to ‘Are you seeing anybody?’ and ‘What do you do?’ and (excruciatingly, more than once) ‘Who’s your crew?’

I’m simultaneously enjoying the social buzz, and the downtime, here. I’ve met more people in the past week here than I have in the past six months in London, and I make friends with people I would never have encountered. My inner extrovert is getting fed, on a holiday diet of mostly-new acquaintances. I miss my other close friends and family (by whom I feel deeply known and loved), but I haven’t feasted on newness in a while, and it’s exciting.

I love walking around, the sun on my skin, bats (yes bats!) flying overhead the park near where I’m staying, and strolls along the riverfront near my workspace. Reading on the beach, mooching around the weird-and-wonderful Pingo Doce supermarket, solo brunches in hipper-than-hip Brazilian-owned cafes; it’s alonement, abroad.

And I feel lonely sometimes. Probably more lonely than in London, where my loved ones live and where I’ve formed cosy rituals and communities that mean I know exactly when, and what, I’m being ‘fed’ socially. Plans in the diary; one of my favourite love languages, and a shared one among my friends and I back in London. Here, plans happen more spontaneously; and that’s a mixed blessing.

So yes, the loneliness happens. Yet it feels like less of a personal failing to be lonely as a foreigner in a foreign land, than it does back home. And it feels less scary, knowing I’m one of the foreigners – not one of the people who really should have it sorted by now (i.e. a Londoner in London). Loneliness feels more like an opportunity. More like something I should pay attention to, and follow the trail of. Like, what flavour of lonely am I feeling today, and how might I satiate it: community, intimate conversation, romance? Where could my loneliness lead me, where I wouldn’t have gone in my comfort zone of London?

On the romance front… Being single is easier here, too, because it doesn’t feel abnormal. I’m tired of being defined by what a podcast guest on my latest series called the ‘single at wedding years’. I’m so, so tired of app dating. I’ve reached the point, after a fair investment in cognitive behavioural therapy and a lot of yoga, where I no longer believe I’m unlovable; I genuinely just haven’t met the right person. And it will happen. But God, I don’t need to be reassured of that, unsolicited, at parties anymore – parties where there’s no one to flirt with, because everyone’s taken.

I’m at a time in my life where I could be blossoming, but there’s nowhere to grow. I’m more confident and sure of myself than ever, but what to do with that? With my London lifestyle as it is, it’s hard to be a main character – more a supporting one, at the celebrations of the things I should be doing, but am not: weddings, baby showers, housewarmings. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve built a life I love in London, in so many ways. I am so lucky to have it. And yet here I am, cheating on it outrageously and telling you all about it.

Perhaps the flame of being here will burn out, and I’ll start craving home again. Maybe absence is what my heart needs, to make it fonder. To spice up my relationship with London, the cool, cosmopolitan capital city of opportunities that I’ve lived in, and loved, since I was 13 (and loved from afar before that, while growing up in Liverpool). Perhaps it won’t, and I’ll have to make some tough decisions; or at least learn more than five words of Portuguese (my latest, incidentally, is insaciável, which means ‘insatiable’. Read into that what you will).

Does my life belong in Lisbon – or is this just escapism, an emotional and spiritual affair, as it has proved for years? Did I just need this break from London, to appreciate what I have there – and then bring back elements of the lifestyle I enjoy so much here, in my already-stuffed suitcase?

I don’t know. Which feels like a strange thing to admit to the thousands of you who so kindly subscribe to this newsletter, and read it every week, but I hope this particularly honest (and, I must say, off-the-cuff) dispatch at least resonates with some of you. Because we’re all a bit lost sometimes, and if there’s a catharsis for me, in admitting that on the page, then I trust there’s also a catharsis in reading about it. And perhaps it is being here that allows me to exhale to this degree, and write this all out. Again, I don’t know. And, if you’re reading this, I’m glad of your company amid the not-knowing.