Loneliness and solitude are different things. How else can we explain the feeling that, even after a whirlwind of socializing here at Harvard, we still can experience the dread that maybe no one truly understands us? Maybe, we think, our friendships are not as deep as we would like. Maybe we are still searching for people who see the world as we do. Maybe we talk and drink and party but nothing anesthetizes the awful feeling of being encaged in our own minds. Anyone who has felt this isolation knows how debilitating it can be.

Because we are afraid to be honest, the self-therapy for loneliness becomes what Harvard students do best: busyness. In “The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century,” Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz make a plausible argument for the correlation between loneliness and busyness in modern America. They argue that, because people feel unable to confide in others, Americans seek therapy for loneliness instead in superhero activities—marrying themselves to work and taking on more projects than they can handle. Emptiness becomes anathema. Booked schedules offer a sense of fullness while leaving no time for needing people.

My own confessions of loneliness are often met with surprise. I wish it did not have to be such a shock. I wish that we did not have to be taken aback that smiles can speak the language of isolation as much as tears. I wish that loneliness did not have to be a secret to whisper behind closed doors for fear of losing the image of the perfect socialite-slash-conversationalist that we love here at Harvard.

But for now, when alienation strikes, I bury myself in the frenetic scramble to drive the emptiness away. Rather than expose my loneliness, it is much easier to be a superman, to take an extra class and join another student group for fear of white spaces in my schedule, so that at the end of the day, when someone asks me why I seem down, I do not have to lie when I say, “A lot of work. The usual.”

What I would rather say is this: “I feel lonely sometimes. Do you?”

Andrew D. Kim ‘16, a Crimson editorial writer, is an applied math concentrator in Eliot House.