Dr. Vivek Murthy

But then I began my first term as Surgeon General with a listening tour and started encountering people all across the country who were telling me about loneliness.

They, by the way, never use that term.

Rarely do they come up to me and say, hi, I'm Shoshana Vivek, I'm lonely.

But instead they would say things like, I feel like I'm carrying all these burdens in life by myself.

It'd be really nice if there was somebody to share this with or to lean on.

College students would tell me, I'm surrounded by lots of other students, but I don't feel like I can really be myself.

Nobody really knows me.

So I feel like I'm just on my own.

And I would hear these heartbreaking stories from people of all ages, parents, grandparents, young people who would say, I feel like if I just disappear tomorrow, nobody would even notice.

I feel invisible.

And to me, these all spoke of a similar thread of loneliness.

But then I saw it many times in my life as an adult as well.

I remember in particular the time where I was going through my confirmation process my first time serving as Surgeon General and ended up being a very

difficult, challenging confirmation process because it caught in this swarm of politics around statements that I had made around gun violence.

I had said gun violence was a public health issue for the nation.

And I saw that as a truism, not as a controversial statement, but in the political world we live in, it turned out that it was a political statement to some people.

And I remember those many months of trying to figure this out.

I was very new to this whole world of DC and government.

I'd never worked in government before.

I'd never dealt with