There’s a version of loneliness that belongs to people who moved far from where they grew up and built a beautiful life somewhere new, only to realize that nobody in their current world knew who they were before. And sometimes being fully known matters more than being fully comfortable.

Most people frame loneliness as absence. Not enough friends, not enough contact, not enough proximity. The conventional wisdom says: go to events, build community, make effort. And for garden-variety loneliness, that advice works. But it entirely misses a subtler, more stubborn variant that affects people whose social lives are perfectly full. People who relocated, reinvented, climbed. People who are surrounded by warmth and still feel like they’re narrating their own life from slightly outside it.

The loneliness of not being known is structurally different from the loneliness of being alone. And the distinction matters, because the remedies are completely different too.

The gap between being liked and being known

When you move far from where you grew up, you effectively perform a soft reboot of your social identity. …