Member-only story
Solitude Is Hard to Find
People don’t want you to be alone
I’ve struggled with finding my own space my entire life. I had the best run in high school when my room was too scary for my parents to enter. One wall was lined with New Yorker magazine covers, another with glow-in-the-dark posters of tigers and lions from the Circus Circus in Las Vegas. The rest of the vertical space was pinned in pithy quotes. A list of the 7 Deadly Sins, a project I was working on, was thumbtacked over my desk.
My parents stayed out, partly because they weren’t overly social either, but I got a clear mixed message: it’s good to be social, and you need to constantly work at it. They were homebodies, and my dad had a job as a diplomat in which he was constantly tinkering with his introversion.
Being alone is a privilege. The rich buy many luxuries, perhaps the most delicious of which is privacy.
The message I got was that being alone was self-indulgent. Yet, I knew this was the only way I could do what I loved: writing and drawing. Algebra and French were pointless but I did them, too, for the sake of studying what I liked.
I improvised a secret patio as a teen, a few square yards atop the brick chimney landing, where no one else could climb. Nobody bothered…
