How To Be Alone.

Some people will read this and feel relieved. Others will feel accused. Both are correct.

Paris. June, 2011. Alone.

A Sunday in late June in Paris. 2011.

I am 31 and married but slowly starting to not be into the idea of being attached to anyone.

This fucking scares me. He is a good guy. And everyone tells me that I am lucky.

It hits me, watching my own behavior, that I like the version of myself when I am alone.

But I am struggling with the empty spaces.

Because I have no one to answer to, I drink one night and set about Paris on foot around midnight and catch the last boat across the river, because I can.

On the way home, I pretend that I am talking on my cell phone so that any creep who might be watching me thinks that someone knows where I am. But no one does. And I start to plant seeds for trusting myself completely. For feeling free. And unbothered by the tethers of my safe and structured life back home in Toronto.

I start to practice being bored the fuck out of my mind and seeing if I can handle it. I almost break under the weight of the silence and heat in the apartment this one afternoon that I begin to try.

It feels like the only other living thing in that apartment are the tiny yellow tea roses that I bought that morning at the market. They are now tattooed on my ribs. For no reason. But maybe a reminder of my super power that started to slowly plant itself back then.

Somewhere between 2 and 4pm are what I call The Witching Hours. The hours in which we can spiral mentally, day or night. Between 2 and 4 in the morning is just as bad. Just as hard. I have had insomnia since the end of my marriage. And what used to break me waking up at 2am and pacing around to keep myself busy is now the time that I begin to write. But I had to train myself into this existence. And training only happens through action. Not through ideas or assumptions about what you are capable of when put to the test.

I have earned my super power. My solitude. Not because it was easy, but because I knew that on the other side of knowing how to be alone, and content, were the more genuine and selective choices about who I let into my life down the road.

These days, I do not fuck around with people who do not want to be around. If you want to go, please do. I would hate to think that anyone stays in relationship with me out of obligation or a lack of knowing how to leave. If you feel you need to go, then you must. And my solitude lets people know that my life is not a revolving door to run through.

In Paris, in that small, hot apartment in June, I learned to be bored and survive it.

I am not perfect at it. Sometimes I need people. I love to be in the company of loved ones who love me. But I will not keep company with someone just because I cannot be alone. I can. And I will. And typically, I must.

Sometimes it is not company I seek, but the witnessing of a fun life I have made for myself. An invitation to the things I like to do: go to storytelling events, walk around the city for hours, have long dinners and conversations, sneak into hotel pools in the summers, go to the beach in the middle of the day, and raves after midnight, just because I can.

Fifteen years after that summer in Paris, alone when I did not have to be, but chose to be, I now rarely think “who can I bring with me” to do this or that. I just go. I just do. I just live according to no one’s plan or timeline, asking no permission and giving no check-ins as to where I will be.

When I want to take a roadtrip, I no longer ask myself: Who will come with me? I just rent a car, book a hotel and go. Being in someone’s company now is the exception to the rule. Not the baseline from which I build. And I think that is a beautiful way to live.

Companionship is wonderful. I love friends and I love lovers. But I love time with myself the most. I think I have always been this way, and marriage was the detour, and so was every relationship after that, more examples of how I am happier when I am alone.

Nothing in life is free, even your freedom has a price. And that price is often bearing the weight of what it takes to really like yourself when you are with your own behavior and no external feedback or approval.

But it all started somewhere, and I can pinpoint the moment, in that hot apartment in Paris in June, when the beginning of the end started for my marriage and the life I had built with someone else since I was 18.

I watched a leaky faucet drip for two hours in that apartment, between 2 and 4, and did not get up once. I let my own skin feel gross to me, not from sweat, but from silence. The discomfort of no noise. No chatter. No plans. And no one to answer to for awhile.

I let the dead weight of summer and loneliness take me over like a spell, and from then on, I became possessed with the idea of having this freedom all the time.

I took more trips alone after that. I always invited my husband to come, but he rarely did. So I would travel to learn, to feel, to cry, to meet strangers and to write. Some of those stories took years to form. But being a writer is not just about the writing. It is about the research. A science of experience put into words that are all true.

I swear that I could feel my brain rewire itself as I sat alone watching the fucking faucet drip. I let myself be still and hate it, sweating in silence until I could not tell the difference between my own body and the sofa.

The worst possible feeling.

I let it all the way in to build a tolerance I knew would be necessary to survive what I did not yet know lay ahead for me.

It is easier to endure suffering when you know it will end. But the unknowing, and doing it anyway, is where resilience and character are won.

Call it instinct. Call it crazy. But now, I call it a superpower. Solitude has been the remedy to anything mediocre or less than I was built for.

I sat there and stared at the drip, drip, drip of the faucet, melting into the sofa as I touched on all my worst fears. I sat there until no more thoughts came and my mind went blank. I remember that I started to laugh at how this could be my life. Bored and alone. But free.

I can admit that I tricked myself into thinking that was a real taste of loneliness back then. I underestimated what leaving my marriage would do to my mind. Boredom. Insanity. Silence. It all came next. Maybe I had not trained long enough for it or maybe I left too soon. Likely not soon enough. None of it matters now, because I no longer get anxious about being anxious when I am in my own company for long periods of time.

To me, solitude is not a consequence of bad decisions anymore or even a reflection of my worth. It is the choice I make consistently so that I have options about how and with whom I spend my time.

My husband and I were attached at the hip back then, and I did miss his company while I was away. But every time I returned to Toronto after a trip on my own, I missed that alone version of myself. She was free. And being with her became my driving force into the unknown.

Some people see a single woman as a woman unchosen. I have been someone’s significant other many times, but never to my full satisfaction. I am built to love big and have yet to meet the container for that. I am looking for no one, but always open to the experience of something new.

When I hear: “Oh, Sandy, don’t worry, you’ll find someone”, I tell them I am not looking, so fuck, I hope not. Not now. Not just when things are getting good and the superpower is getting stronger. Refined yet undefined, and intense.

People are not uncomfortable with my solitude, but the lack of their own. I am proof that it is possible, but also that it is a sacrifice, built over years, and an endurance and becoming likable to yourself, which most people, oddly, are not.

After 25 years of studying people and writing about them, most of us do not really like our own company enough to be alone for more than a day or two. Maybe a week at best.

Not advice, but you are going to be with yourself your whole life. Might as well enjoy the company and learn to like who you are.

Solitude is a spectrum. For some people, it’s a snack, a break from others. For me, it is often a full meal, and being with others is the dessert or delight when I want it.

This all started with a moment. A leaky faucet, 15 years ago, and being alone with myself to a breaking point that finally, at 45, has set me free.