When I was a kid I had this recurring fantasy where I was the only person left on Earth. Everyone else gone, not due to some cataclysmic event, but just gone. Raptured? I dunno. The point was, there was something deeply appealing to me about being alone. I think part of it was the independence, the freedom to go wherever and do whatever without having to wait or abide by arbitrary rules or worry about potentially hurting someone else. As a kid, rules can feel stifling, especially when seemingly everything cool is kept from you simply because you’re young: you can’t go much of anywhere since you can’t drive, you can’t afford the things you want because you don’t have money, and you can’t make the decisions you want because they’re all made for you. But I think another part of the appeal of solitude was about freedom from being perceived. If no one else was around, I could exist without the fear of scrutiny. There would be no chance of embarrassment, of rejection, of being misunderstood. No one could get upset with me for doing something incorrectly. No one could draw attention to the way I looked.
This fantasy, I think, is pretty indicative of how I often felt about life growing up — I felt boxed in, railroaded. There were the forces that fenced me in and blocked opportunities, and there were the forces that drove me to cower in self-preservation. Things that kept me from want I wanted, and things that threatened me with what I feared. The fantasy ridded me of both.
Growing up I felt like I was always surrounded by people. At home I would be with my parents or my siblings, at school I’d be with my teachers and classmates and countless others passing through the halls, and on the weekends I’d be at extracurriculars or at large extended family gatherings. As an introvert who had trouble making conversation, and as a chubby kid who was always self-conscious about his looks, all these highly-populated situations were pretty exhausting to me. I needed my time to recharge. The one place I mostly had to myself was my bedroom (at least, during the years when I wasn’t sharing a room), and even that was subject to my parents’ preferences. So I found little times and places throughout the day to recharge, even if only for a little bit — sitting alone under the slide at recess, or going to the bathroom and sitting down in a stall just to have some time to myself. When those weren’t an option, I retreated mentally — into a book, or a game, or the doodles in my notebook, or just idle daydreams.
Nowadays, as an adult with an apartment and a car and an income, things are about as different as they could possibly be. The only things that practically prevent me from doing what I want to do or going where I want to go are a lack of time or funds, rather than a lack of authority or the tools to execute on them. And when I feel like I need to retreat from the world, I have my apartment where I live by myself and essentially no one else can enter. Privacy, independence, and autonomy are all afforded to me. And for the first couple years of this new living situation, I liked it quite a lot. But the more time I spend in it, the more I realize how isolating adulthood can be.
Now that I live alone in an apartment, my opportunities for solitude are far longer, more frequent, and less prone to the whims of others. I can walk through my front door after work, lock it behind me, and know that for the next several hours at least I won’t have to deal with anyone else if I don’t want to, and I won’t have to worry about how others perceive me. I can be purely and unapologetically myself. And even at work, where I spend most of my time in a little room by myself, in front of a computer screen while wearing headphones, and most of my communication with coworkers is done via text, I retain the “not having to be perceived” bit, at least somewhat.
But when you spend months at a time in this pattern of living — waking up alone, driving to work alone in my little box on wheels, working mostly alone, and returning to an empty apartment — things can get lonely.
I feel lucky that I have friends and family I can talk to almost any time, but actually spending quality in-person time with any of them is difficult. Going to school may have forced me to spend lots of time around people I didn’t necessarily care about, but it also allowed relationships to grow naturally. My friendships were a result of consistently occupying the same place with other people and being forced to interact with them. When you find someone you click with and enjoy that shared time with, that’s when friendships happen. And I didn’t need to put in a lot of effort to keep those relationships going, since we knew when and where were going to see each other next. Now, separated from that more structured social experience, I need to actively invest in the relationships I want to maintain. A lot of this is about the rhythms and patterns of our lives no longer intersecting — my work schedule is unlikely to be exactly the same as my friends’, for example. And creating those opportunities for natural socializing is difficult due to just the infrastructure of our cities — we are a largely car-dependent civilization here in the United States, built around mostly single-family homes and heavily zoned areas divided from each other by highways, and I’m unlikely to run into anyone I know (or much of anyone at all, really) during the day when 90% of my time is spent in solitude at home, in my car, or at work. I felt the effects of this growing up, too, and I think everyone in America does, whether they realize it or not. Kids wouldn’t feel so bored at home or retreat to the internet so much if car-dependent suburbia didn’t isolate them from their friends and cut off any opportunity for safe exploration of their neighborhoods. Parents wouldn’t be so stressed or exhausted at the end of the day if they didn’t have to spend so much of their time driving their kids around from appointment to appointment. Adults wouldn’t feel so drained by their commute if instead of bumper-to-bumper traffic requiring their constant attention they had reasonably accessible, clean, quick, and safe public transit, or lived in cities designed for pedestrians and bicyclists instead of cars.
So what that leaves many of us with is a situation where creating, building, and maintaining relationships (other than those with the people who live with us) requires a lot of scheduling, planning, and investment. Unless I or one of my friends reaches out and asks to hang out, often for a specific reason, I might go weeks or even months without spending in-person time with any of them. And if you’re not regularly and intentionally putting in the effort to examine your own life and the way you feel (yay therapy!), it might take you a long-ass time before you realize how deeply, desperately lonely you are.
I think it can be especially hard for single adults who live alone. I get the impression (which, to be fair, is based almost entirely on assumptions and vibes) that my friends who live with their significant other are less likely to feel crushed by the weight of this societally-imposed solitude when they have their partner with them at least some of every day. And I worry that one day my non-single friends will just get used to home life and won’t feel the need to reach out the way I do, and I’ll feel more alone than I already am. I’m lucky that I have several close friends who live anywhere from five to fifteen minutes away from me by drive, and that those people are able to make time to hang out with me and with each other. But I worry about the coming years as well. Seeing as how most of my close friends are women, queer, and/or trans, more than a few of them have considered leaving Texas for more welcoming political & cultural climates in other states. I could leave too, except that I’m not at all sure where I would go, and everywhere worth going seems significantly more expensive than where I am. And what about kids? Once my friends start having children, will there be any time or energy left in their lives for casual evening or weekend hangs with their childless friends?
To be fair, I do really value the privacy and solitude my current life has afforded me. I get plenty of time to recharge, in a space I get to call my own and customize to exactly how I like it. Not being beholden to anyone else’s preferences or lifestyle or habits is a major relief from stress, too. And there’s just something about having a home to yourself that feels confidence-boosting, like I’m worthy of personal space and autonomy and independence. After spending nearly my whole life living with other people, having my own private sanctuary has been such a breath of fresh air.
But the gifts of independence can only do so much to counteract the emotional toll of isolation. For all the noise and stress that often came with living at home, I really miss being able to hug someone everyday. For all the anxiety of school life and the cramped quarters of dorm living, I miss the feeling of living in a community, and all the spontaneous social interactions that came with it. And ultimately, the more time I spend alone, the more time my brain has to be agitated by fear and self-doubt — having time to yourself gives you all the more space to wonder, “Do people actually want me around? Would anyone ever want to be in a relationship with me? Am I going to be alone forever?”
As much as I wish we could just change American society to be more community-focused, more human-centered, and less isolating, there’s not much to be done about that in the short term. The truth of the matter is that I’m struggling, right now, and I can’t simply wait for the world to get better for me. In the past year or so I’ve put a lot of effort into paying attention to my moods and my social needs, going out of my way to reach out to friends and get out of my apartment for new experiences when I can. And it’s been really rewarding to actively invest in that side of life. It just doesn’t feel like it’s enough.
In the past, I’ve found that when I try my best to write from the heart, and then put that writing where people might see it, connections can form pretty naturally. It’s largely for this reason that I started blogging in the first place. I was tired of feeling alone with my emotions, and while putting them into words could be cathartic on its own, the real dividends get paid when someone reads what I’ve written and reaches out to say, “I get it.” Suddenly I’m not just shouting into the void — I’m participating in a shared experience. It’s as if the universe is saying, “It’s not that you’re alone, it’s that people believe they’re alone, so they keep quiet. You only need to speak up.”
Someday I hope I can build a life for myself where I get to spend every day with people I care about — find a home in a new place, get into a more engaging and community-driven career, meet my life partner. But until then I think the best I can do is to keep cultivating my current relationships, be open to new opportunities, and try to connect with people through my creative pursuits, starting with my writing.