Solo Dating Turned My Life Around
Who are you when you’re truly alone?
I had just come home from boarding school.
To finish up high school back at home, living with my parents.
This was a tough time for the family. My dad had a heart attack and fell into a coma. My mom spent years just taking care of him.
In the meantime, I struggled to make friends at my new school. To make things worse, I joined months after the academic year began. All the newbies had already settled in.
And you know how high school is, the cliques and everything. There I was, without one. The lone sheep.
I had never been afraid to do things alone.
Because I had the support of countless friends around me.
It’s easy to run 100 metres alone when you know someone will join you for the marathon after that.
That bravado lasted in my new school for a while too. I sat for breakfast and lunch alone without feeling conscious. It was alright. It barely mattered with everything going on at home.
But slowly, it started to.
I had no one to talk to. No one to spend my evenings with.
The confident girl I’d been just a few months before turned self-conscious and started to doubt herself.
I started hiding in the washrooms to avoid meals.
Something had to change.
Life felt pretty bleak by this point.
Why couldn’t I find joy in the little things anymore?
I’ve always been a big foodie. I love good books and exploring new cafes, sipping coffee in the sun. These tiny parts of my life that had always brought me so much happiness were now cut out.
Because — I had no one to go with?
It took a while.
I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do it by myself.’ Things aren’t always that easy, are they? You don’t always feel like a bad bitch.
Sometimes, life gets you.
But after months of deliberating and ruminating. Of staying home under my blanket feeling suffocated and utterly alone, I did decide — fuck it.
I started to take myself out.
To restaurants, movies, cute cafes, bookstores, and more.
Slowly, but surely I started to feel confident again.
Of course, I felt subconscious at the start. Wondering what other people were thinking of this girl who had no one to go out with. I was sure every single person in the room was judging me.
Until the food tasted so good, the books seemed so interesting, the movie plot was so fantastic, that I forgot to worry about everyone else around me.
Over time, spending this time alone — away from social media, Netflix, friends and strangers in my head helped me become more confident than I had ever been before.
It helped me find myself.
I was left alone with my thoughts, with no one else’s opinion to worry about, no imaginary people in my head judging me and I just let myself be.
I found myself wondering and daydreaming about things I was interested in, finding new things that I liked, and being kind to myself. Something I hadn’t done in a long long while.
At last, I learned to take care of myself.
And it brought with it the wonderful gift of self-awareness and self-love.
Which brought me here today.
Giving me the confidence to sit at my little old desk in my room, sharing my thoughts with you. Unafraid of some old acquaintance in school who might find themselves here and judge.
If you want to do what you do in life, unafraid.
If you want to find what matters to you.
If you want to be yourself, fully, without any fear of judgement (at most times, at least).
Take some time alone.
Not in bed with a movie playing in the background. But some time with just you and your thoughts.
Take yourself out for dates—go for a walk, take yourself out to dinner, go shopping alone, go see a movie you’ve been waiting for.
And you’ll find yourself brimming with confidence, realising there’s nothing you can’t do. All you ever needed was your permission, your own approval.
With love,
K
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