It’s not so much the hassle as the CHOICE. It’s such a responsibility! You see colour is HARD. It means things. It infers. It makes statements, and creates moods.

Colour makes people FEEL things.

So I suppose it’s not really surprising that colours and feelings sometimes get mixed up.

Feeling blue.

Seeing red.

Tickled pink.

The green eyed monster…

I think it’s because we know the words for colours before we know a lot of other descriptive words. Certainly we know our basic colours before we know the words to describe more complicated things – like feelings.

So when we don’t have the words for a feeling, we still have colours as adjectives to fall back on. Before words form, and after they’ve been lost, there’s colour.

Well, it occured to me there isn’t a standard colour that we’ve collectively agreed upon for LONELY.

Loneliness is something I’ve thought about a lot, in recent years.

The first time I felt lonely I was a child.

I was a child with OCD, and I needed to check the light switches and taps, and I couldn’t not do it in case something bad happened, and I couldn’t talk about it because I knew no one else would understand, and I didn’t have the words.

The second time I felt lonely – really really lonely – was when I became a mother.

I felt removed, and isolated, and drugged with doubt and fear, and I couldn’t shake off doom and I knew no one else would understand, and I didn’t have the words for it.

What I did have was colours.

The thing is that I don’t think lonely is one colour. There’s so many different TYPES of lonely… and each one has a different tint, a different flavour.

Possibly it’s so hard to pin lonely down because we don’t actually TALK about it. It doesn’t get a lot of our words.

Loneliness is the nation’s dirty secret. There are more than 9 million people who describe themselves as lonely in the UK. That’s one in every five – which is quite a lot. And for a thing that happens a lot, we don’t say much about it at all.

Being lonely is… well… lonely.

So I thought I’d try and write down some of the shades of lonely I recognise. Because by giving them a colour, maybe I can give them a shape, a voice. And maybe other people who have painted with those shades might recognise them too, and end up feeling a little less lonely in their own lonely.

If any of these ARE familiar, please let me know in comments which one or ones have decorated your life.

If you have your own shade, please add it to my list. #ShadesOfLonely

Oh, and if anyone would like to give me a job making up spurious paint names, please do get in touch (I think I may have missed my calling).

The Shades of Lonely

Jurassic Crystal

A primal, biting lonely that descends on new mothers. Appears when you are staggered by love and horror, panic and euphoria; when you are supposed to know what you’re doing but don’t, when people think you’re coping but you’re not, when you wander between wonder and wondering what the hell you’ve done, if it’s too late to back out, if you’re going mad, if you can say so, if you’ll ever sleep again, if the baby would be better off without you, or if they’d feed better with nipple shields or the very expensive bottles with scientfically nipply teets – best order them off Amazon Prime now.

Wilted Rose Shimmer

The shade of a bad date where you’ve just realised, iridescent over the top of your smile, that there’s no one in the world that will get you, and maybe actually it’s you and not them.

Amethyst Mosaic

The lonely you get in the school yard, trying to fit in with the other Mums and break into conversations, where you are all pointy purple peaks at wrong angles, with pieces that don’t fit.

Penzance Drizzle

The particular shade of Cornish skies that hangs over you at conferences, and forms an invisible barrier between you and the delegates you’re supposed to be **shudder** NETWORKING with.

Penzance Steel

The unforgiving deeper shade you get standing alone at the side of a room trying to hold a buffet plate, drink, fork, and handbag, watching interactions with both jealousy and relief they don’t involve you, while hoping no one comes up to talk to you with your mouth full, and pondering how soon you can reasonably leave.

Acerbic Lemon

The aggressive, industrious lonely you get rage-cleaning because you hate it, but like things clean, and no other bahoostard can be bothered or will do it properly – tasting vaguely of bicarbonate of soda under the back teeth.

Unsunflower Smudge

The existential shade you get browsing Facebook and trying to figure out why your life doesn’t look like this, why everyone else’s families are happier than yours, what you’re doing wrong, if you’re experiencing your own life wrong, if any of it’s actually true, if reality is even a thing anymore, and if you have a trip to the park or a family meal without it being witnessed online are you actually there/consuming calories at all?

Cerulean-brink Tincture

The clear, fearful lonely you get watching the world go to hell on a handcart, when you are powerless to do anything and afraid for the future, and when you realise a Home Economics GCSE, English literature A-level and a marketing certificate do not constitute the apocalypse survival skills you’re likely to need. Only you can’t voice those fears, obviously, because they’re probably stupid and ill-informed – but they’re still there anyway.

Velvet Rust Ice

The deep, plush lonely of 3am, feeding and rocking a fussy baby in the dark by cold light of smartphone, desperate for sleep, tarnished with the knowledge the rest of the world is muted and peaceful, far, far away. Rough and smooth with a metallic finish. Old blood, and a draught around the legs.

Toffee Dove Mist

The lonely of facing a mountain of domestic chores or even a single domestic disaster, where everything is muddied to brown and responsibility curdles it grey.

Writhing Chartreuse

The sweating, shuddering shade you get being violently ill, possibly from both ends at once, with no one to hold your hair up, help you back to bed, take the rubbish out to the wheelie bin, put the washing on, change the sheets, or basically care if you actually get up again the next day.

Fluorescent Mint

Jarringly, incongruously bright, the shade of social awkwardness overlaid with toothpaste that you get in a group of peers, where you feel slightly off-kilter and out-of-sync with everyone, and you’re looking at the world from the back of your head through the long, long tunnel of your eyes.

Aztec Tangerine Punch

The wild lonely of overwhelm you get covered in needy children when it’s just you and you have to be their everything and you’re supposed to make it all better and know all the answers – but everyone shrieking at you is only as loud as the roar inside your head that you’re not good enough and can’t help and you don’t know what to do and there are no options or good choices and you just crave some peace to pull your pieces together and hold them, just hold them, in an approximation of the right place. Acrid echoes of almonds, salt, and hangovers.

Dappled Apricot

The smooth tart lonely you get when you’re not covered in children, when there is too much peace, when they’re playing nicely or off with friends and getting independent and suddenly don’t need you – and you realise being someone’s everything was your everything, and that it’s already fading and it wasn’t enough and you didn’t notice or cherish it enough either.

Oxtail Blush

Late at night, weary and raw, when the kids have gone to bed and there’s so much to do to tidy up and prepare for the next day, but you’re so tired you can’t move and you’re watching unsatisfying crap on telly, because you can’t watch anything good because you’re supposed to be up and doing things, and it’s getting late and it will all start all over again tomorrow too soon but you can’t quite bring yourself to go to bed because the thought of brushing your teeth feels insurmountable, and you are conscious that you could just sit there all night and no one would know or care very much, and one day you just might.

Tuscan Dawn

When you’re watching a rom com, and someone says something beautiful about why they love someone else, and you realise no one in the world has ever felt that way about you.

Midnight Molasses

A gloopy black/brown, retracting sluggishly as you wake with a wrench in the middle of the night, trying to escape it. Cloying, receding nightmares and clinging, dawning realities are all mixed up and bogged down – and too sticky to let you slip back to sleep.

Hush-hush Turquoise

The cold, still lonely you get in a medical waiting room, waiting for results, possibly watching a Dr gear up to give them, where life stops at the bottom of a heartbeat in a calm that isn’t but can’t get out, where you are conscious of yourself as a straight rod of light inside, afraid to touch your own walls.

Sepia Mauve

A yellow-tinted, wavering lilac, that smells of old lady, potpourri, and burning rubber. A shade you get sitting on the sofa watching a programme you don’t want to watch but don’t want to rock the boat over, next to a long term partner you don’t really know and aren’t sure you like anymore. It is a sickly precipice of either change or resignation, and you can’t look at it directly.

Battleship Peach

When the kids go off with your ex and the days without them stretch ahead, thin, insipid pastel with a grey pearly sheen. It covers everything, at least for a while.

Sunset Ivy

Bright bitter orange, with livid green cheese-veins spreading out like poison. The shade of lonely you live when you see pictures or hear stories of your kids’ life without you, of the family that’s not yours anymore, of the woman that plays your role when you’re not there.

Hollow Ochre

The empty, defeated slurry of lonely after an early miscarriage. Where what you have to grieve is mostly an idea, more real to you than anyone, slippery, and slipping away. When you have been robbed by your own body and can’t talk about it or show your sadness, and it’s hard to see anything in colour.

Fuschia Auburn Blaze

A bright, exhausting slash of unreal pink, burning yellow to black at the edges – the exact shade of bruised fireworks behind your eyelids in the sun. It is the lonely you get when you are in the midst of an obsession or routine, when the Dark says you have to get up and do your checks, or or go through your rituals – and you can’t get out of it and you can’t talk about it, because no one is going to understand, and if you tell the secret there’ll be a price, and you’re trying to keep everyone safe, and if you stop or fail or let on, the Dark will win.

Vermillion Gash

A vivid, desperate, pleading wound, bleeding freely and seeping into everything. It is the volcanic shade of injustice and impotence converging, when no one believes you, when no one will help you, when your reality is denied, when you just want to be SEEN, to be acknowledged, to be understood – and you are clamouring for it but no one will hear you and you are screaming noiselessly into an indifferent abyss – and it hurts so wretchedly on the inside you want to claw at the outside so it balances out – so the colour of the lonely is made real, and red, and hypnotising, and both the sea you’re drowning in and your only anchor.

It has faded, Vermillion Gash. But I still feel a flash of it sometimes.

I think once it’s part of your palette it doesn’t leave you. Some of the #ShadesOfLonely are fleeting – others stain.

I hope you don’t ever feel Vermillion Gash lonely, or Hollow Ochre, or Fuschia Auburn Blaze, or lots of these colours, really. I hope you don’t have a worse shade all of your own. But if you do, I hope you show it to people. I hope you make ART with it. I hope you use it to describe part of the world not everyone else can see but that some will find a mirror in, not just a painting. Because by hiding loneliness away – especially the darker shades – we create more of it.

I suppose the first rule of Lonely Club is to talk about Lonely Club… And colours – the very first words of description we learn – can maybe help us describe the indescribable, the confusing, the secret, the shameful, the painful.

Start with the feeling, and then give it a colour. And then describe THAT.

If everyone shares a shade what we’ll end up with is a rainbow – the international symbol of inclusivity and hope. And you really can’t be lonely under a rainbow.

At the very least we can petition Dulux to create some new and patently ridiculous paint colours. Who knows? I may even use one in my living room. Eventually.