My take : Being alone can be a choice. It can bring peace, rest, and time to heal. But loneliness is different. Loneliness is feeling unseen, unheard, misunderstood, and unloved, even when you are surrounded by people.

You can be in a room full of people and still feel like no one sees you. You can have family and friends and still feel completely isolated. Sometimes the people in your life only call when they need or want something from you. But when you are the one who needs someone, it can feel as though you are the only person in the world.

That kind of loneliness can consume you. It can bring a despair that slowly takes pieces of you away. In that sense, loneliness can make you die an early death, emotionally and even physically. You can still be alive, still get up every morning, still smile, still function, while something inside you is slowly fading.

We are all human. At some point in our lives, most of us will know what it feels like not to be seen, heard, understood, or loved in the way we need. That is why we need to pay attention to one another. We should reach out not only when we need something, but simply because another human being matters.

Sometimes the loneliest person is not the one sitting alone. It is the person sitting in a room full of people, silently wondering if anyone truly sees them.

The blurred faces seem to, signal at how the person wanted anonymity, that s/he doesn’t want to be, recognized by the world, and, maybe that suggests to, the feel of, loneliness…