Aloneness.

My 34 year struggle with myself.

The first time I can remember feeling the acute pain of aloneness was in middle school. My family had moved just a few years earlier, and even though the town where we now lived was just 20 miles from where I spent the first small handful of my life, they may have well moved me to another country, and I struggled to make friends that felt as close to me as the ones I had left behind. On this particular Saturday, I’d made tentative plans with the two girls who had started to feel like a close approximation to the friendships I was craving. And even though I’d called them to check in on when we’d get together, I’d heard nothing concrete, so I laid on the nubby carpet of my bedroom floor, wrapped myself in a blanket, and let the loneliness wash over me.

I remember how tactile the pain was in that moment. It felt like I was being both overwhelmed and emptied at the exact same time. I remember the feel of the scratchy carpet against my check, and the crushing desire to want to comfort myself, so I pulled the pillows off my bed and made a little palette to curl up on, like a woman in a mourning portrait from the 1600s. It was a feeling I’d come to know over and over again, for more meaningful reasons than a couple of preteens leaving a new friend out of their plans. (I later found out they’d gone to the movies without me, having wanted a day to just hang out one-on-one like they had before I’d come to town — a perfectly reasonable desire that felt like a slap in the face to 12-year-old me.) But if I had to point to the first moment I felt alone, really, really alone, that’s probably it.

Since that Saturday on my bedroom floor, I have been running away from the idea of aloneness. If we really had to distill my main motivation down to one single epigraph to chisel onto my tombstone, it would read “her life was an attempt to escape loneliness.” For the longest time, I considered aloneness and loneliness to be the same, one feeling unable to exist from the other, because I had only every felt them together.

And then I was 24, and living on my own, and watching so many people around me pair up. I was lucky to have been in a phase of my career where I was kept busy, and so my nights were spent going to launch events and after parties and dinners where I met person after person after person. After, I’d pour myself into a cab, lubricated from multiple martinis, and watch the city throb around me as I was whisked back uptown, my nose pressed to the smudged glass. I remember feeling like I was the only person to be witnessing New York like this, and realizing that, in that fleeting second, I didn’t feel alone.

But without fail, I’d come back to my cramped studio apartment, and the loneliness would creep back in. I’d lay myself on the scratchy area rug and I’d once again feel my insides empty, and it was like I was back on the floor of my childhood bedroom all over again. So I started going out more, leaving behind my cave of aloneness, filling my days with so much activity that the roar of loneliness was reduced to a bit of white noise in the background. I went on over 100 first dates the year I was 26 — a feat nobody accomplishes without a compulsive fear of dying alone. I threw myself into work at a company that called itself my family. It was all I could do to keep that empty ache away.

Just three months before my 28 birthday, I was laid off, and the loneliness swallowed me whole — not just because I was still single, but because, in one fell swoop, the life that I thought was my armor against being alone was suddenly gone. I cried in bathroom stalls. I cried in grocery aisles. I cried on the smooth parquet floor of my bedroom — why spend what little money I had on an area rug? — and wonder when it would all be over. Even though I had friends and family and a support system to cling to, I still felt desperately alone and unsure of whether or not I’d ever fill the emptiness that seemed to grow inside me every day.

I think I’ve spent a lot of the past two years wishing that I'd faced my fear of aloneness, well, alone, but it took a bad relationship to bring me to the light. We met when I was 29, and after so many years of fortifying my walls against the rush of loneliness, I was eager to let the first willing person in. Looking back, I can recognize now with a sureness that feels like a cold sweat how wrong I knew that relationship was early on. How, while on a girls’ trip with my two best friends, he teased me for the numbers of pictures we were posting of our time together. How, when I’d put on my big fur coat and bright red lipstick for a date night, he’d told me that he could tell I was dressed that way just so other people would look at me. How, when we were all forced to shelter in place, he told me he didn’t want to come to my apartment, but his roommate was still at his, leaving me all alone in the early days of the pandemic.

And yet, I forged ahead, because I’d found my ticket out of aloneness, and there was no turning back. We signed a lease together. We bought furniture together. We made tentative plans for the future together. And on the first night in our apartment together, I laid on my back, stared at the ceiling, and felt the rush of loneliness splay across my chest. But I’m not alone I thought to myself. He’s there, lying right beside me. And yet, the feeling wouldn’t recede, and I realized how desperately I wished I were alone.

I started seeking out pockets of alone time. I’d wake up at 5 AM and take hours-long walks through Brooklyn. I’d jump at the chance to dog sit, or cat sit, or plant sit for friends and family who were out of town, relishing in the opportunity for solitude. I started asking him to leave the apartment and see friends so that I could sit on the couch, order takeout, and watch How to Marry a Millionaire. And when I had to return to the apartment, or when he’d inevitably come back in the door, a part of me would wince with disappointment.

One afternoon, about seven months into cohabitation, after I’d looked to him for comfort during a particularly rough patch of my career where I was sure I’d never write again, we wound up screaming at each other across our kitchen table. I told him that he couldn’t understand what I was feeling, because he wasn’t listening, and that he’d never understand, because he never listened. “You’re a pretentious hag,” he spat, and the force of it knocked me onto my heels. I stared at him, stunned, before quietly walking to our front door, putting on my shoes, and walking out the door.

After 15 minutes of wandering, I found my way to a bar down the street, and as I sat in the window, sipping a double vodka on the rocks, I realized that I was alone, and that it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it felt better than what was waiting for me in that basement apartment on St. Marks Place.

Three months later, I was alone again, in an apartment I’d paid for by myself, having learned the hard lesson that it is uniquely possible to feel lonely without being alone. And, I had realized, that being lonely without being alone was a fate worse than, you know, dying alone. So I started to learn to be comfortable with aloneness. I still went for my long walks in the morning. I turned down plans to spend Sundays on my couch with a joint and Drag Race. I started casually dating a lawyer who took me to nice dinners and booked a cozy cabin upstate for New Years Eve, but when I realized I’d begun to enjoy my time alone more than I enjoyed my time with him, I immediately called it off.

Sometimes, I find myself nostalgic for the year I learned to be alone. A few weeks ago, I asked Ben if he would meet up with friends and give me a Sunday to spend by myself in the apartment, so I could smoke a joint and watch Drag Race and order dumplings, just like I did in my jewel box. But as I sat on the couch, with our dog Edie curled up beside me, and watched him get ready to leave, I didn’t feel excited. I felt longing.

I enjoyed my day of rest and relaxation and aloneness, but I still felt warmth in my chest when I heard his boots on the stairs later that night. And I realized how fundamentally my relationship to aloneness had changed. Ours is a relationship built on mutual respect for the other’s independence. As I write this, he’s in the office behind me, working on his art while I’m in here working on mine. That is the balance I think I’ve been searching for all along, and when I’m done writing, I’ll walk over to his side of the apartment and wrap my arms around him.

Now, I look to aloneness as an old friend, once you can text when you’re spiraling because they’ve seen you at your worst. It’s become a safe space, a place of abundance, not the cave of emptiness I dreaded as a teenager. And, in truth, that only came about when I stopped running from loneliness, and instead, ran toward it, arms outstretched, ready to catch myself. I wish I’d been brave enough to do that sooner, but I feel so incredibly lucky to have learned that lesson now.