How to Be Alone
A guide to tolerating solitude in the Peace Corps
Jane is a Peace Corps Volunteer currently serving in a pueblo in the department of Atlántico, Colombia.
First things first — if you’re a natural introvert, get outta here. The following is about how I learned to enjoy spending time alone, despite my extroversion. Introverts have their own issues, and I’m not a good person to write about them. Go somewhere else.
Before joining the Peace Corps, I was a raging extrovert. Unlike introversion, extroversion is generally considered by society and pop culture to be a good thing. It’s how you win friends, forge connections, and make money; It’s how you integrate into a new school or city; It’s how you find roommates and jobs and basically anything you need to survive as a person. It’s also how you become a successful member of the Peace Corps.
If you decide to join the Peace Corps, many things will be uncertain: where you’ll live, what you’ll do, and how well you’ll communicate with the people around you. One thing that is always certain for every volunteer, however, no matter where or when they serve, is that they will be alone. A lot. Among other universal experiences in the Peace Corps, loneliness and isolation are the reasons why many volunteers don’t make it through service, and if they do, why it feels like such a harrowing experience.
Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker explains how she dealt with loneliness during service in her piece “Learning to Make Lasagna in Kyrgystan.”
“I began to see how cooking, as a pastime, could alleviate the paralyzing sense of incompetence that can descend on a person during unfamiliar and trying times.”
The following is my how-to guide for dealing with solitude during Peace Corps service, and other unfamiliar and trying times.
1. Learn to do nothing.
Before you can do anything, you have to learn to do nothing. I’ve written before on work ethic in the Peace Corps, but Jenny Odell really nails it home in her book How to do nothing. Essentially, she says, your worth is not defined by your productivity. Thinking that way it is a symptom of late capitalism that tells us leisure time is unproductive and, therefore, bad. Sitting in silence, developing hobbies, and learning the skill of reflection are valuable and healthy ways to spend your time. Not only should we not feel guilty for doing nothing, we should actually carve out time for it. Luckily, if you’re reading this article, you probably have some of that.
2. Help yourself.
I’m a big fan of self-help books. Though there’s debate over whether they really help, I love how widely the perspectives in them vary. Maybe that’s why they don’t work on a grand scale — because the things that make one person feel better, fitter, happier, or more tranquil aren’t the same things that make someone else feel that way. I like exploring the plethora of ideas that exist about how to make our lives better, even if they are kitschy and distilled to the point of nonsense.
If you’re a person who despises self-help books, take a deep breath. You don’t have to read one to complete this step. Just figure out some way to improve your life. It could be exercise or learning another language or macrame. Don’t just fill your time with busy work — dedicate yourself to one or two things, big or small, that truly make your life better.
There’s a reason why Peace Corps Volunteers are some of the most resourceful individuals you’ll ever meet: most of us don’t have very much money or great options for petty entertainment, so our creative outlets are wide and varied. Friends and fellow volunteers have created everything from BookBall (a reading competition modeled after fantasy football) to a self-taught Spanish language learning guide and an Instagram account featuring vegan meals made with limited grocery selection.
Everyone has something that makes them tick. If you’re lucky enough to spend your day job working on that thing, find a side project. Bake bread. Paint watercolor portraits. Choose something you wouldn’t normally get paid to do. Better yet, choose something you’re not good at — that fact alone will make your time doing that thing more meaningful.
If you, like the rest of us, ache for more purpose than a regular workday can give you, this is your chance to grow in the ways you’ve always wanted. Choose your endeavor wisely and, not only will it make you a happier person, it’ll probably make you a better candidate for your next job interview.
3. Buy a speaker and/or Bluetooth headphones.
When I was little, I used to refer to the characters in the shows that I watched as my “TV friends.” My mom said I told stories about them as if I actually knew them. This is pathetic, yes, but it’s also a good indicator (I think) of how much I absorbed what I was watching rather than mindlessly staring at the television.
One of the hardest parts about spending long stretches of time alone is the silence. It’s entirely possible during Peace Corps service to go days, maybe even a week, without speaking to another human being. Aside from actually leaving your house once a day (that advice for a different how-to article,) a good way to boost your mood during these times is by listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks.
I chose to include this step for many reasons, not the least of which being that music helps set the mood for your day. It fills the silence, creates routine, and regulates your mood when there isn’t a lot of other stimuli around to do it for you.
When it comes to podcasts and audiobooks, combine this with step two. I like podcasts because I can listen to them while cooking, an activity that I do for hours at a time. Listening to podcasts helps me feel surrounded by some kind of community — my podcast friends, if you will. This community might be fake, but nonetheless it helps me connect with the world around me without requiring my full attention like a hobby might.
4. Build your community.
Speaking of community, once you have your podcast friends in place, it’s time to make real friends. One side effect of being alone for long periods of time is that you start to dwell and wallow in your own problems. This is particularly true if one of those problems includes loneliness.
Peace Corps Volunteers, for example, can go many months without much interaction from fellow volunteers. That’s why the challenges we face, though common and predictable, feel so monumentally frustrating and insurmountable: because we aren’t talking to each other enough to realize how many of those experiences we share. When we do, it feels easier to move forward with a community that has our backs.
Problems feel smaller and easier to tackle when you know you’re not alone, but forming a community to help you realize that doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. It can be a group chat, shared memes with a friend on Instagram, or just being brutally honest about your misery next time someone asks you how you’re doing. On social media and otherwise, we like to project positive, composed images of our lives. Being vulnerable enough to talk about what you’re struggling with more authentically will give others permission to do the same. Cue Brené Brown’s Netflix special, follow this advice, and *BAM* you have community.
5. Practice.
Just like a phobia of heights or spiders can be treated by exposing yourself to those things, being alone gets easier the more you do it.
I was a competitive long distance runner in high school. For the longest time, running by myself was a demon I could not confront. When I could muster the courage, I struggled through every run without teammates, usually quitting early. Running was a kind of therapy for me, and it felt debilitating not to have it available if someone wasn’t around to accompany.
What helped? I mapped interesting routes through the city and plugged in a good playlist. Then I forced myself to run solo over and over again. With time, the sense of calm I derived from running overrode my fear of doing it alone.
The same applies in the Peace Corps. No matter how much you dislike it, you will be alone a lot. The only solutions are to make peace with your solitude, even view it as an opportunity — or go home. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably trying to avoid some version of the latter.
If you’re feeling paralyzed by a fear of being alone, do it anyway. Cultivate your ability to do nothing, help yourself, buy some headphones, or text a friend. You’re in for a long and terrifying ride; but if you, like me, crave the tranquil freedom of spending endless hours alone without a flinch, your efforts will be rewarded.
