Finding solace in solitude
For many of us, the idea of being alone instills a sense of angst. Making peace with your own self has to be one of the most onerous tasks. This feeling, however, is not uncommon. In fact, a recent study in the journal Science showed that people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with their thoughts for just 15 minutes.
There’s a term for this — Autophobia. The fear of your own mind.
Food for thought though, is not being able to be alone with your own thoughts a real problem? Why can’t we just live every moment of every day doing something, so we wouldn’t have to face ourselves? We could certainly do it. We’ve been doing it until now and we could probably do it for the rest of our lives.
However, the real question is, what would our lives be if we could stop for a few minutes and just do — nothing. What if we could let our thoughts flow through without any resistance, without any distractions, and we could just focus on what’s going on inside our head.
Before you assimilate, let’s look at a few scenarios which I feel might imply Autophobia.
- Fear of being left out
This feeling is rather familiar, autophobia or not. One of the instances where you might experience this is — you are amongst people you know, but you get extremely anxious if you are not involved in the conversation. Your first instinct is to draw attention to yourself.
To avoid being left out, you become the gel that keeps the group together.
And to add to this list, you don’t like closed doors.
2. Inability to say No
You know you can’t say no, and it’s so frustrating. If you say no to someone, you feel this insane amount of guilt for no reason at all. You realise you should say no, but you just can’t do it. You know when you are being peer pressured or asked to do something you don’t want to do. Nevertheless, the fear of being left hanging by yourself is so nerve wrecking, you give in to it. This might lead to others believing you are gullible. That’s why it’s very important to have people around who understand you and not take advantage of you. Over the years, you might have learned to say NO a couple of times, but there’s never a third NO.
3. Altruistic
This is pretty obvious. You don’t want anyone to think you are not what they expect you to be. This makes you an excellent people reader as you mold yourself according to their understanding of you. However, this is what takes you furthest away from your own self.
To top it off, you get really emotional if you sense even the tiniest bit of resentment. You cannot stand someone disliking you, especially people you like. You want to know what is it that you did and rectify it so they begin to like you. It doesn’t matter who the other person is, they must like you.
4. Easily attached
The slightest sense of affection from anyone is enough to turn your world upside down. Your mind now has a purpose, it has one thought, and everything else is background noise — to somehow reciprocate their feelings. You’d move mountains for this person even though they might not need you to. In fact, they might not even acknowledge your existence at a later point. Needless to say, you are insecure and constantly wonder whether this person will like you or not, which might lead to you coming off as desperate and needy and eventually them cutting all ties with you.
5. Sleeplessness
Insomnia or sleeplessness is associated to a lot of other conditions, such as hypertension and anxiety. However, the key difference is, not being able to fall asleep and not wanting to sleep. You could sleep if you wanted to, however, you avoid it. You will not sleep until your eyes give up on you. You’ll postpone sleep as long as you can and rarely sleep voluntarily. The reason, simply being, you’d have to do nothing to fall asleep and the time between you close your eyes and actually fell asleep is tormenting.
Well, some of these apply to you and some of these don’t. You might wonder, isn’t everyone Autophobic?
To a small extent, yes. Every person needs some companionship and desires some validation. However, not everyone’s life is dictated by it.
Why must you find solace in solitude?
You have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. This might seem a bit superfluous at first but just ponder over it.
Life’s not about doing something constantly. Sometimes, you just need to hit the pause button. Sometimes you just need to be. To do this, you must be able to listen to your thoughts. You should be able to let them flow and go wherever they take you without being scared.
I’ve recently realized the importance of it, thanks to the lock down. A grueling four months during which I am positive most of us have been at the lowest of the low. We’ve all craved for affection and attention from anyone who would give it. We’ve hid behind any distractions we can occupy our minds with. We’ve gone too many sleepless nights trying to avoid dreams that we might not even remember the next morning.
Just like the first step towards solving any problem is to acknowledge it, the first step to finding inner peace is realizing we don’t have it.
If Po can find it, so can we :)
After all, aren’t we all just real life Pandas wanting to eat, sleep and do nothing all day!
The purpose of this story was to let any one of you out there, feeling the same feeling, know that you are not alone. There’s no problem in the world that is unique to you. No matter how low you’ve felt, no matter how hard life has been on you, you don’t have to run away from yourself. There’s hope. Start taking control of your life, take control of your thoughts and take one small tiny step at a time. Eventually, you’ll realize all these tiny steps you take now, will help you reach a place you would have never thought you could.
See you on the other side!
