It's dinner time and feeling claustrophobic in our hotel room, we wonder the main streets looking for a place to eat.

The bars and restaurants are filled with loving couples and animated groups of friends.

We gingerly enter a diner, but as we take in, the warmth and convivial atmosphere was struck by a cute self consciousness.

We blushed crimson and clumsily turned to leave before an approaching waiters had the chance to offer us a seat.

We eventually find a dried out sandwich at the station kiosk, which we eat furtively on a park bench.

Newsome.

Loitering pigeons Eating alone in public could be one of the great hurdles of psychological life.

It can be an exceptional trial because it forces us to wrestle with a set of thoughts that for most of our lives, we successfully pushed to the back of consciousness that we are, in essence, an unacceptable being tainted almost from birth, an outcast, non specifically diseased, unattractive to others, an object of quiet ridicule or open mockery, undeserving of love and sinful to the core.

We may not have this explicit thesis in mind as we decline to sit down by ourselves.

But the scale of our embarrassment speaks of a latent suspicion of our own being.

How loveable we can feel as adults is in large measure the result of how we've been looked after by a few significant figures in childhood.

No one is born with a capacity to love and endure themselves on their own.

We learned to soothe and care for ourselves by first experiencing the tender gaze of someone else and then internalizing their reassurance and kindness, replaying it to ourselves in isolated circumstances down the years, the lucky ones among us, those with no compunction about ordering a meal that a table for one must somewhere in the distant past have grown secure through others, admiration by which we now ward off suspicions that the headwaiter is sniggering and the couple in the corner a teasing us.

We who were perhaps at that time not much larger than a pillow, will lend a powerful sense that we had a right to exist, that we were an asset to the world, that others should be pleased to see us.

All of which means that now even when the care givers a long gone, the charge of love we imbibed lenses an impression that the laughter from the next table is innocent and that we deserve to be brought another basket of bread and the evening paper.

But the less fortunate among us have no such emotional blanket.

Whatever our accomplishments or status would never, far from a sense that everyone is mocking and would have good reason to try and harm us.

We need with a conscious effort to do what others have learned automatically.

One side of the mind needs to comfort the other must make the reassuring noises we never natively received must soothe us because no one else ever did, although where our own in the restaurant at the moment, we must strive to hold on to a picture of the rest of our lives.

Two days ago, we were laughing with our friends, of whom we do have some great examples.

Tomorrow will be in an intense discussion with some colleagues.

We have bean loved and held tightly in other's arms before we're on our own right now, but we're not social outcasts after all.

We should remember along the way how little anyone ever thinks of us in the best possible sense.

Everyone is, for the most part, gloriously indifferent to everyone else.

The person cracking a joke with a group of friends has not rerouted their evening to try and mock us the attractive individual deep in conversation with a companion, maybe talking about how lost they are in their new job.

They aren't speculating on how isolated, ugly we are.

Those are voices in our heads, not theirs.

We should take comfort to from the idea that there is at points, a distinct dignity and even grandeur to being an outsider, to not always being part of the pack to taking time to step outside the normal social flow in order to consider humanity from an oblique solitary angle.

The temporarily friendless and isolated person has privileges and the possibility for insights denied to those always surrounded by the easy chatter of their acquaintances.

The great champion of the Lonely Diner, the American painter Edward Hopper knew howto lend appropriate prestige to those who are on the outside, who could nurture ideas not sanctioned by the crowd, whose loneliness deepens their soul and may make others long for their friendship.

The central figure in Automat is far from an object of pity.

She is a center of quiet depth and insight.

We might yearn to sit with her rather than feel sorry that she's as yet on her own.

It is in the nature of the anxiety around eating alone that we feel we're the only ones to suffer from it.

We should take comfort in numbers.

There are many of us out there, and those of us who were timid in this field are not wretched or pitiable, which is taking time to contemplate things from the outside for a while.

And we will, in the process, be readying ourselves for the deepest kinds, friendship and self knowledge.

When these come along, our perspective cards feature tools for a wiser, comma perspective on life.

They helped to restore calm and clarity even during difficult times.