Being alone with myself.
I watched a video recently (an actual video surprisingly, not a TikTok) and in the video, a lady was talking about how humans constantly need to be in a community, and when you’re isolated from everyone else you get in your head a lot and get depressed. In as much as this is true, I would like to disagree.
I don’t think many of us know how to be alone and what makes us depressed in our isolation is the fact that we’re scared of being alone with ourselves. We are strangers to our own selves and note that this is not an article encouraging everyone to cut ties with their friends and run to the mountains or whatever but it’s an invitation to create time to be with yourself.
Being alone is very different from feeling lonely. According to Google, loneliness causes people to feel empty and unwanted whereas being alone refers to a time when a person is on their own or when no one is around or present with them. For most of us, being alone is equated to being lonely because we feel disconnected from the world. We live in a world that requires our full attention 24/7. Every second of every day we’re consuming information from different sources and rarely do we get time to check whether the information we’re consuming is helpful or if we even need it. After days of listening to external sources and external voices, we forget what our own voice sounds like. We become a collection of everything we listen to and everything we watch or read be it good or bad — garbage in garbage out. When we disconnect from all that, even for just a day, it feels unusual. It feels so strange.
I used to think I liked being alone and at some point, I think I did. But with time the idea of being alone actually scared me. Even when I was ‘alone’ I wasn’t really alone. I was always on my phone, running through the same apps trying to feel connected in some way to something else. Something other than me. I also used to think that being alone meant that I had failed. I grew up thinking that people who always kept to themselves had something wrong with them. The goal was to constantly socialize and make as many friends as possible even when my social battery was beyond negative. So being alone for me was a constant reminder that I didn’t try hard enough to make friends or socialize even when I knew that the effort I was putting in was too much already.
For the past few months, I can boldly say that I have been alone. During this period of isolation, I’ve been reading The Art of Being Alone by Renuka Garvani. In this book, the author explores the importance of creating time for yourself not to run away from the world but to find yourself. In the book she quoted Rollo May when she said, “Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone and so they don’t find themselves at all.”
If you’re running from being alone you’re running from yourself and this could be for many reasons. For me, it was mostly because I had deviated from the woman that I wanted to be. I wasn’t doing what I knew I should be doing and I was ignoring and distracting myself from the thoughts I knew would put me back on track. I had also begun to accept some things about myself, things I could never change, and being alone meant thinking about the hows and the whys which I did not have the energy for. I was comfortable with being distracted. In this period of isolation, I began to redefine what being “the woman that I am meant to be” meant and if I was really that far from her or almost there.
There are many things we have grown to believe about ourselves because of what we constantly hear or watch. We self-diagnose based on information we get on TikTok and put labels on ourselves because that seems easier than doing the actual work of getting to know ourselves. For a generation that is so connected to the world we are so disconnected from ourselves. We do not know what we want, we do not know what we like and we’ve settled with not thinking and instead being fed with information. This has its pros and cons though. Getting information has never been a bad thing but the downside is our minds have become lazy. We can not focus on one thing at a time. We’ve suppressed the parts of ourselves that are authentic and traded them for copy-paste versions of the things we see on social media.
When you’re alone, you deal with one mind. Wouldn’t it be nice to turn down the noise and just sit for a second and be with yourself?
Okay, short disclaimer, I tried this. It was an exercise in the book I was reading and for the first five minutes, I felt uneasy. The exercise is to spend an hour or less every day doing nothing, just sitting by yourself. Not listening to music or listening to a podcast just doing nothing. For me, it felt weird but after the first five minutes of me trying to reach for my phone, I started having conversations with myself. (please don’t cancel me.) It wasn’t like I was talking but it felt like I was going through my thoughts one at a time. Imagine being an overthinker but instead of only overthinking your thoughts you’re overthinking ideas and comments from everyone else around you 24/7 non-stop. That has to feel overwhelming.
As I’m writing this I am reminded of that episode of Spongebob where he was going through his mind. He was talking a walk, literally in all the corners of his mind, and looking at all the memories and the different versions of himself with their different voices. What would your mind look like? Would it feel like 50 tabs open at the same time with background music or would it be a calm walk in the park?
In an ideal world, this would be easy. But because the world is constantly demanding for our time and attention it’s hard to spare an hour to just sit and do nothing without thinking about all the things you could be doing and all the time you’re wasting but time spent on yourself or with yourself is never wasted time. And time is always going to go, you know so why not use it to take a walk with yourself? Take a walk in your mind and take out all the useless things. Question everything you’ve known to believe as truths and this can be truths about yourself or truths about the world we live in. Turn down the noise and focus.
