It's important to learn to appreciate solitude

I know it will sound like cope and maybe it is, but if there's one thing that this period of prolonged isolation has taught me in the last two years is how important it is to be alone. Not lonely, alone. And by alone I don't mean that you should willingly isolate yourself if you already have a good social life and have worked on healthy relationships with other people, I mean that if you are alone right now, if you feel spiteful and resentful by standing with yourself and no one around you, you don't know how to be alone.

You are looking for other people just as an escape from the situation you're in, guess what that's not going to solve it. You have to work on yourself first, your mind is all you truly have so instead of leaving it to mold and rot in the dark while you cry for yourself, work on it, turn it into your temple. You must do that first if you want to actually go out and meet people in a way that will actually be good and constructive. You come first.
If today you just went out and got approached by some random person who, for some reason wants to be your friend, one month from now you're gonna be the exact same person, but now there's somebody next to you, so you must think to yourself that you're not lonely anymore right? Wrong. As soon as that person leaves, loses interest, as soon as life goes on, as it does, you will find yourself lonely, again, and even more miserable than before because you'll now also be nostalgic and remorseful of that friendship that went lost, you'll feel knots in your throat thinking back on it, living in the past, maybe you'll be fond of the memories, but as soon as those subside and you come back to reality, you realize how much you've failed and how you haven't improved at all since a year ago, even though you thought you had cause you thought you weren't lonely anymore. You were, even when you were with them.

Being lonely isn't about being physically alone by yourself, I know that sounds cliché, but you can have as many friends as you want, they will fill up the dead air, but if you haven't worked on yourself, if you haven't learned to feel like you would feel with a friend when you are by yourself, you will always be lonely. Like Seneca said in his letters to Lucilius "Why should I weigh my words in front of a friend? Why should I not feel like I am alone in front of him".

I've personally come to the conclusion, and I could definitely be wrong, that true happiness comes from independence, by that I mean freedom from any external factors that could alter your integrity if taken away or changed. You can't rely on that, or those external things will effectively become a part of you, which also means you could easily lose a part of yourself if those things, whether they'd be material goods or people, went away, and effectively.. die bit by bit, if you know what I mean. Every one of us is alone in their brain. Community is a beautiful thing, friends are a beautiful, but we also must be in tune with ourselves in order to be a better, healthy and functioning member of that group or community, but that can only come from within ourselves. If you work on yourself, if you have the same feeling you would have in a place crowded with friends when you're alone and vice versa, you will never be lonely. Restore your mind, feed it with useful information, not with useless clatter and self deprecation, invest in your culture, invest in your spirituality, whether it'd be religious or philosophical, read, meditate, build your life on solid roots so that when the storm comes all those material little things you would have otherwise built it upon will not crumble apart, but you'll withstand it and come out even better than before, enriched by the trauma that other people tremble in front of.

Stay strong friends