Tanya Davis โ How To Be Alone
If you are at first lonely, be patient.
If youโve not been alone much, or if when you were, you werenโt okay with it, then just wait. Youโll find itโs fine to be alone once youโre embracing it.
We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; youโre not supposed to talk much anyway so itโs safe there.
There is also the gym, if youโre shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.
Then thereโs public transportation, because we all gotta go places.
And thereโs prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.
Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers , employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.
Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run , take yourself out for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. Youโre no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.
Go to the movies. Where itโs dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.
And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no oneโs watching because theyโre probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until youโre sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of lifeโs best things, down your back, like a book of blessings.
Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might have never happened had you not been there by yourself.ย
Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them.
But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.
You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.
But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those โsappy slogansโ from pre-school over to high school groaning, weโre tokens for holding the lonely at bay.
Cause if youโre happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.
Itโs okay if no one believes like you, all experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, canโt think like you, for this be relieved, keeps things interesting, lifeโs magic things in reach, and it doesnโt mean you arenโt connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.
Take silence and respect it.
If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesnโt get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, donโt obsess about it.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.
If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.
There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
