I would say, ’I’m alone, but I’m not lonely.’ But I was just kidding myself.

The line contrasts solitude (a neutral condition) with loneliness (an emotional state) and then undercuts the distinction: the speaker admits that the brave, self-sufficient pose—“I’m alone, but I’m not lonely”—was a form of self-deception. Read as a moment of candor, it suggests how easily people reframe pain as independence, using a clever aphorism to avoid acknowledging need, grief, or isolation. The final sentence (“But I was just kidding myself”) is the moral pivot: it values emotional honesty over image-management, and it implies that naming loneliness is the first step toward addressing it rather than romanticizing it as strength.