“To so much of the world, solitude is strange,” Anna Quindlen.
I’ve never lived alone. I went from living with my parents to sharing a college dorm. Later, I traded apartments with sorority sisters to a slightly larger apartment with my husband. I don’t think I would like living alone. But, at this point in my life, it seems like something I should have at least tried back when it may have made sense.
These are the types of things you recognize when you get older. You also notice, as Anna Quindlen also wrote in her book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, that people think alone is a synonym for lonely. This isn’t the case.
I have spent a month at a time living as alone as a foreign traveler can be and felt perfectly contented to go my own way and do my own thing.
I also have felt lonely more times than I care to admit in a house full of family or a room filled with people.
The thing I’m discovering is that loneliness is internal. It has little to do with your surroundings and everything to do with your perception of them.
One thing teaching abroad has done for me is made me confident when eating alone. I spend a month or two every summer dining alone.
Apparently, however, I’m bad at making these arrangements. Once when a host asked me how many were in my party I replied with “It’s just me.” A grandmotherly British woman standing nearby overheard my response and scolded me in the way most grandmothers find acceptable. She said, “It’s not ‘just you.’ It’s you! And you are quite enough.”
Well played, British grandma. Well played.
I never will forget that exchange, which led me down this path of discovery.
It’s ok to want to be alone. Many of us who rarely are actually learn to crave it.
It’s also ok to realize when you are alone that you want to be with people and to fulfill that need.
The trick is learning that neither is wrong.
Let’s Talk Nerdy!
Do you prefer spending time alone or with other people?
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