Embracing Solitude and Living Alone
The first night that I moved into my new apartment alone, I set up my projector, threw on Gilmore Girls, and cried into the honolulu chicken that I had ordered from Hawaiian Bros, a flimsy plastic fork the only piece of silverware that I had. As I looked around at the precariously stacked boxes dotting my floor, I realized that while loneliness was a semi-constant state for me, I was now truly and positively alone.
After a year of living by myself, those gutting moments have lessened in both frequency and intensity. This isn’t to say that I don’t still experience them – there are certainly evenings where I can do little else but wrap myself in the isolation, letting it overtake me and allowing myself to feel its depth as I soak in a too-hot-lavender-bath and listen to Adrienne Lenker’s voice reverberate against the linoleum. Thankfully I have just as many nights where I’m enamored by the simple joy of being able to light every candle in my apartment, make popcorn, and read naked in my living room.
That’s the beauty of living alone – there is no one to answer to but yourself, leaving you solely responsible for the ache and pleasure in equal measure.
You will undeniably be lonely. There are moments when you will listen too deeply to the silence of your home and feel uncomfortably aware of your smallness amidst the empty space that surrounds you. You will grow tired of your own company, weary of the self-perpetuated feedback loops. For perhaps the first time in your life, you cannot evade yourself.
And amidst all of that loneliness, tucked neatly into the discomfort, you will find the kind of fulfillment that can only be found when you’ve finally run back into yourself with open arms. As you learn to make peace with being alone, you learn to honor your innermost needs and desires without compromise, and begin to ask for the same from others. Your relationships gain a new level of intentionality as you put effort into the spaces that benefit your growth and minimize it in those that don’t. The sky’s the limit in who you can become when there’s nothing and no one else around to distract you from yourself.
If you’re thinking about living alone, do it. There are ways to mitigate the isolation – listen to podcasts when you’re overwhelmed by the empty space, set routine coffee dates that you can rely on, or choose one night out of the week to make dinner with a friend. Create points of connection with yourself, whether that’s yoga in the morning or just getting high and painting in your room on a Thursday. You will always feel some semblance of loneliness, whether or not you’re living alone. That is unfortunately an inescapable part of being a complex human being. But loneliness is a small price to pay for the unprecedented growth that awaits you when you finally learn to embrace the promise of solitude.