curing female loneliness

how to be a girl alone: enjoying my own company and finding a meaning to life through solitude.

Until a couple of years ago, I’d never put too much thought into the art of being alone. I’d always filled my space and time with people, and it’s safe to say I craved their affection and attention. I'd never put attention to myself or to ‘being’. I was stuck in a perpetual cycle of forced relationships that were supposed to fill the void I felt on the inside.

Until the worst came, as the dark days in life often do, suddenly and all-consumingly. Facing three major traumas in quick succession that ripped me from myself, left me with no identity and completely stripped of emotions, thoughts or a personality. I was a shell of a human and I had no way to process what had happened to me.

I had to be alone to find myself again, but that wasn't why I started, I didn’t have the energy to sit on my sofa most days, I certainly didn't have the energy to be around anyone. I was deeply, insanely unwell. I needed that solitude, and it was my only option. This was my first real conscious effort at truly being alone, although it wasn’t conscious enough. It wasn’t the peaceful break from life I expected. It was quiet and cold and it was gritty and the space filled itself with psychosis and obsession. I laid in bed all day, every day. I read books, starting with ‘A Little Life.’ I watched movies on my laptop and I slept fourteen hours a day. I’d leave my room maybe once a day to eat and replace the overnight oats from my fridge or I’d order a burrito from the Mexican down the road and I’d take it back to bed. Some days I didn’t eat at all. I’d sip from the same cup of cold coffee that I’d periodically refill and I wouldn’t wash the cup for a week. I started to apply red lipstick when I woke up at whatever time of the day or night, so the rim ended up covered in rings of red and I certainly wasn’t removing it before crashing back to sleep. I developed some of my worst hallucinations, lost all sense of time, and felt an unbearable emptiness that I felt nothing could fill.

I did start to leave my house again, and I exited complete seclusion with a sense that I knew myself better. In some ways, that ritualistic isolation did bring me back to myself, and I found my people again, but I wasn’t okay, and as my dangerous behaviours grew, I was admitted to hospital. It was here I became fully conscious of the art of being alone. I fully immersed myself into the culture of being alone. Both whilst I was there and in the weeks after leaving, I mastered sitting with the deepest, darkest depths of my mind. Journalling to explore my psyche. I journaled my way through a whole Moleskine soft cover notebook in a matter of weeks. I found the media that defines me. I developed a taste for literature, film, art, poetry, feminism and music: all things that had defined me before, approached on a new level. I read everything I could about and from Sylvia Plath, every Ottessa Moshfegh novel and then all the literary fiction I could find. I watched every film I could, settling on my vibe very quickly and devouring the likes of Practical Magic, The Love Witch, Little Women, Lady Bird, Frances Ha, Priscilla, Dead Poets Society and the The Virgin Suicides. I downloaded Letterboxd and Goodreads and tracked everything I loved. I curated Pinterest boards, curating my aesthetic to the nail, refound my love for the 60s and started a digital diary log, and I enjoyed being alone. In finding myself, I had unlocked the key to enjoying my own company. Learning about myself meant I knew myself, and I liked that person, and I wanted to spend time with her. I had hobbies that called to a solitude to engage in, because while I do share those with the people around me, the curation calls for being by myself.

Later, I dyed my hair red and and I started scheduling alone time like I schedule time for my friends. Maybe dying your hair at 2am in the bathroom is the cure to loneliness and in a way I think it is. It’s these rituals that allow your time with yourself to have shape and meaning.

I began to like the quiet, and while I had to sit in the gloomy days alone in my house in order to become encapsulated by them, they didn’t stay dark forever. I think I left a part of my soul in each of them but it only made me fuller, because I built a museum of me and everything I’ve ever loved and filed it away in my brain. I never got better, if anything I’ve probably gotten worse, but being able to have conscious solitude has created a whole new essence to my life, and somewhere along the way I learnt that sometimes, life really is better when you’re alone.

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