Tea with Demons: Buddhist Lessons for Navigating Queer Loneliness

If you’ve been on the internet in the last decade, you’ve probably heard about “the epidemic of loneliness.” And if you’re queer, you might have seen versions of this framed specifically for our communities: how, despite dating apps, social media, and a rainbow-saturated marketplace, many of us still feel painfully alone.

It’s a strange paradox... We were promised that technology would connect us, that legal progress would liberate us, and that visibility would melt our shame. And yet—scroll through Grindr, or sit alone in a packed bar, and you’ll see how connection can still feel maddeningly out of reach.

In therapy sessions, I hear versions of this story all the time: Sometimes it’s a breakup. Sometimes it’s moving to a new city. Sometimes it’s the kind of loneliness you feel while lying next to the person you’ve loved for years. It’s often tangled with old wounds: rejection from family, bullying… that persistent sense of “I’m different, and I’m all alone.”

In most Western psychological frameworks, loneliness is treated like a problem to solve. Something to cure. Something we must escape. And, of course, sometimes loneliness really is corrosive. It can harm our mental and physical health. But there’s another perspective worth considering.

In Buddhist traditions, loneliness isn’t a problem to fix; it’s a teacher to learn from. Chögyam Trungpa wrote, “Once you give up your search for companionship, you can make friends with your loneliness. At that point, you become a genuine practitioner.” That doesn’t mean you resign yourself to isolation; it means you stop fighting the fact that, at some level, we’re all alone.

And when we stop fighting this, something shifts... Loneliness becomes less like an enemy banging at the door and more like a curious, sometimes awkward dinner guest. If we pour them tea instead of shoving them out into the cold, we might learn something—about ourselves, about what we value, about the kind of relationships we actually want.

I often think of the 11th-century Tibetan yogi, Milarepa, who spent years alone in a mountain cave. He had demons visit him—literal ones, according to the story. He tried to banish them, and they only grew more monstrous. Only when he invited them to sit down and share tea did they leave peacefully... The metaphor writes itself.

Engaging in therapy can be a way of inviting our “demons”—including loneliness—to tea. Not to banish them, but to be with them in an openhearted way. To notice the stories we tell about what they represent. To see how we might relate to them differently—less as a crushing weight and more as a reminder to tend to the parts of ourselves that are longing for connection.

If loneliness has been shadowing you, maybe the goal isn’t to get rid of it right now. Maybe the goal could be to sit with it, listen to it, and see what it’s been trying to say all along.