I have been lonely my whole life. I haven’t exactly been alone, but it has felt like it for all practical purposes.

My father interpreted my normal small child behavior as evil and told my siblings to stay away from me lest they be tainted by my wickedness — going so far as to make them sit on the other side of the dining room table at meals, to protect them from the infection of my proximity. My parents deterred neighborhood kids from coming over to play with the requirement that I study the Bible with any hapless interlopers who made the mistake of wanting to be friends with me.

School was a nightmare of enforced isolation, from the parental dictate that I stand alone in the hallway during the Pledge of Allegiance, and sit in the library alone during holiday celebrations in the classroom, to being the only child who was required to refuse birthday cupcakes from classmates and having to watch everyone else eat them, to watching the rest of the class exchange valentines, develop friendships, and eventually, date each other. All while either standing awkwardly on the sidelines, or completely isolated in the school main office, reading a book all alone without even the school secretary to keep me company.

One day when my elementary school blindsided me with a surprise showing of a fun (yet unapproved by my parents) movie the day before a vacation, while everyone watched the movie together in the cafeteria, I turned my back and stared at the wall, as I had been taught to do to avoid the corruption of The World, worried the entire time that my parents might find out and interrogate (and then punish) me for not having worked harder to extricate myself from the sin of bad associations.

My parents never hugged me, or ever said they loved me, (or even liked me.) My father told me one day when I was about eight years old that God himself was so disgusted by my behavior that he was going to snuff out my existence as I slept. I was made to go kiss my entire family goodbye because I was the worst person ever. Irredeemable.

Deep in my heart, I knew I would rather risk the corruption of playing down the street on a fun summer afternoon with these poisonous and eternally doomed 10-year-olds, than ensure my smugly righteous (and friendless) survival at Armageddon, and this merely deepened my conviction that God was justified in keeping my infant brother away from me lest he also be cast into a lake of fire right alongside me and my fourth-grade classmates.

Predictably, these childhood traumas encoded themselves in my core inner lens — the lens that still warps my ability to see myself clearly. Even when I was small, I perceived that there was something terribly wrong with my family, and that I needed to get away from them as soon as possible. But by 18 the damage was already done. How does one silence the looping recording buried deep within one’s soul of nearly two decades of daily indoctrination that one’s own parents wish you had never been born?

As an adult, I have also often been lonely. Not alone, because my inability to refrain from striking up conversations with random people has led to concentric circles of friendly people who seem to like me. No … lonely. I have spent many hours alone in the woods and mountains … sitting on rocks in rivers, picking berries along abandoned railroad tracks, and singing to myself. Reading. I am an expert in being alone, but I don’t want to be as alone as I have been. There are many reasons for my solitude that I know don’t have anything to do with me personally and have more to do with the fact that everyone is busy with their own lives of work, family, and entwined companionships that leave little room for outliers. And perhaps others’ solitude feels more to them like it is wrapped cozily around them like a blanket, rather than a barrier behind which everyone else merrily enjoys the absence of me.

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The one thing that has kept me fighting that ever-present nagging feeling that my very existence is irksome to most, has been friends. Because somehow, despite the great efforts made to keep me away from people, to convince me that I am unlovable and unloved, and despite the unwanted patina of decades of indoctrinated self-castigation, I have always had at least one friend who ignored my parents, ignored my rough and unattractive hair shirt issued at birth, and ignored my own efforts to get them to agree with my parents’ stamp of “Unclean” that festers on the mitochondria of every cell in my body, like a trademark. Rosanne, my childhood friend who loved me more than anyone else in my life, and who stood up for me against my parents’ cruelty when no adult would. Elizabeth, my college bestie who was so vocally-angry for me whenever she would witness the fallout of the emotional damage wrought by my upbringing, that she gave me my first vocabulary to express anger at what was done to me. And Kirsten. Kirsten … who always saw me in a way I did not see myself and who was my fiercest advocate because she could not stand for any of the light she saw flaring out from my soul to be dimmed in any way. There are others now, too. Others who let me see myself reflected in their eyes. Others who reach into my soul to tell the baby me deep within that I was never unlovable.

Maya Angelou says “Be the rainbow in someone else’s cloud.” I thank my friends for being the rainbow in my cloud in a life where so much of it has been overcast.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column.