Moving at age 42 but feeling 5 y/o and alone

AKA, The capacity to be alone.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

I feel content in the relationships I have; they’re intimate and deeply caring. I don’t feel particularly compelled to find new people.

Yet…I’ve felt stuck this past year in trying to balance between my need for solitude and my need to feel less lonely. I just moved to a new city, and it’s a big one. I’m just a small little dot here. Not a single soul knew me when I got here last May.

But instead of making friends or becoming more known, I’ve felt there’s something deeper I need to address, something that won’t be addressed by having more friends.

I think what I’ve been facing internally is something quite old. I experienced it already, but it’s bubbling to the surface again, as though I’m still a child and still suffering.

What keeps playing on my mind is this article I’ve read at least five times by Donald Winnicott, a well-known psychoanalyst (in that world).

It’s one of his most popular papers, “The Capacity to Be Alone.” While he worked with people of all ages, he worked a lot with children and mothers. He listened and studied. (Most links to this paper are behind paywalls, but you can access an unofficial version here.)

Alison Bechdel writes/draws a lot about Winnicott in her graphic novel Are You My Mother?

In that paper he suggests, “…this capacity [to be alone] is one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development.”

• He’s not saying that merely to be alone is the achievement. He’s talking about a “sophisticated aloneness” that was built (or not built) in the very early stages of our lives.
• When we were very young, we ideally had the chance to learn how to be “alone” while in the presence of a primary caregiver who was benevolently and benignly watching and observing.
• The caregiver is present but observes without interfering too much, and the baby gets to experience what it’s like to relax and let its true self take over.
• Since the caregiver is a benevolent bystander, and the baby feels loved no matter what, they learn it’s OK to let the true self come out, that it’s safe to do so. Winnicott calls this experience of the baby, “going on being.”
• That’s in contrast, perhaps, to going on performing, hiding, pretending, trying or proving. (i.e. how I felt after I moved — I felt pressured to prove I’d made the right choice and wasn’t going to be friendless and was going to do all the things with my down time that I couldn’t do in my previous city. I was having a very difficult time allowing myself to simply exist within the move and within the adjustment phase.)
• With a caregiver who’s intrusive, the baby learns they’re not OK to be themselves.
• A baby whose main caregiver is regularly absent or neglectful learns that being alone is necessary and one must adjust to it, but it has a lot of anxiety attached to it.

Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash

From my experience, the anxiety as a child is about knowing that I really was alone. There was no caregiver watching warmly from the other side of the room or even in the next room. I learned how to be alone and how to listen to myself in all of that alone time, thankfully, but the anxiety to make sure I was going to get what I needed solve my problems was right there alongside it.

• Cut to adulthood — the child who internalized a benign presence while being themselves, alone, has learned that even when they are alone, they feel a sense of being loved and cared for, of being held in mind, perhaps, from the partner that’s away on a trip.
• They can lean on that for sustenance while enjoying the sensation of aloneness.
• The adult who had an intrusive caregiver still associates aloneness with bad. They can’t trust themselves, and they think some authority out there is going to tell them what’s right or wrong or shame them if necessary.
• And the adult who was neglected, like me, learned to be alone, but without the feelings of love from a parent surrounding it. I had so many Sundays that were full of emptiness because they were slow days that didn’t distract me from the void inside. I could make my own fun, and I didn’t dread being alone, but I still felt the awful void. There’s never been any other choice but to make peace with it.
• In other words:

To be alone may feel persecutory rather than comforting.

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

To illustrate the point:

I couldn’t be myself with either parent when I was very young. My mom required me to need nothing, but be there for her in whatever way she needed, while also never mentioning that I had to help her in any way. My father loved us, but he was religiously strict and had emotional limitations.

I had to hide or push away many thoughts, desires, interests, and behaviors while in their presence.

The good news is that after years of psychoanalysis, I figured out that I really enjoy time alone, wrapped in my own energy, doing the things I love. I internalized my analyst as being with me when I was alone, and I learned how to access the presence of my other loved ones when I was alone.

But things got jumbled again when I moved to a new city.

The old feelings associated with being alone and sequestered came back. I had to work through all of that stuff once again to get back to a place of feeling balanced and at ease in my solitude. (Stuff like feeling full of self-doubt, emptiness, and wondering if anyone even sees me or knows I’m alive…do I matter? Chill stuff, really.)

To be succinct, I had more grieving to do re: my past, and no amount of new friends was going to change that. I got in touch with that little girl who was terribly alone, abandoned while also in the presence of parents somehow.

For me, I could’ve gone back to pretending or hiding like I did with my parents as a child, which would’ve meant running out and joining every club and going out all the time and making friends with anyone I met. Problem is, all of that would’ve been me pretending to be someone I’m not.

Slowly I‘ve begun to feel at peace with myself, alone, again.

I‘ve gotten back to a place where I can remember I have people who are wondering about what I’m doing and are thinking of me fondly and at this very minute thinking of things they want to tell me and ask me or ready to help if I need it. I’m not really alone when I’m alone.

But most importantly, I worked my way back to a kinder relationship with myself. (Didn’t magically happen; I worked at it using art journaling and psychoanalysis and long walks along the water, etc...)

My point isn’t just to relate this entirely to myself and be done with it. My hope is that you the reader will be inspired to think about your relationship to aloneness and solitude. What might it tell you about your early relationships? Are there patterns from those early relationships that you tend to repeat in your current life? Do you feel afraid of being alone? Avoid it? Relish it? Fill it up with tasks?

Maybe you’ll feel inspired to share some of those thoughts in the comments.