65. How do I learn to be alone when I've never spent time alone?

It's pretty scary tbh.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it myself but what I do know is that this week I’ve received a harsh, jolting wake up call. My boyfriend and I were sat by the fireplace a few nights ago and what started off as a light chat before bed turned into a very deep, meaningful and eye opening conversation. One thing led to another and before I realised I was neck-deep in a hole which only I could get myself out of.

This type of reality check isn’t something I’ve experienced before. When I go through some sort of awakening it’s usually much more gradual, or rather than gradual, it takes a longer amount of time until I figure out what the lesson I’m supposed to learn is. It can feel like a rollercoaster but it lasts longer. This time it was boom, boom, boom in around twenty minutes. After the conversation ended all I could do was cry. It wasn’t a sad, upset, my-life-is-falling-apart cry. It was a “what a relief” cry.

The feeling of relief came from understanding why I’d been feeling so dark and heavily deep-down inside of me for so long. When I say “deep-down inside of me” what I mean is that if I were to divide myself into different layers: the outer layer of myself (Emily) was ecstatic to be living in the countryside seeing chickens, sheep and cows on a daily basis. The next layer down was a more chilled and relaxed version of Emily who was experiencing less stress and better health. But the deepest layer of Emily was lost, frustrated, sad, slow and heavy with no knowledge as to why. The other two layers were so happy and so excited but somewhere deep-down, I wanted to run away and go back to my old big city life because these feelings didn’t exist there.

When I say “for so long” I can’t really pinpoint when this profound layer of Emily began to voice herself because maybe she’s always felt this way but my previous busy lives have kept her quiet. Maybe these feelings surfaced when I moved here, slowed down and gave her room to peek her head out. I have no idea… but it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that I hear her now.

“Her” refers to this deeper layer of myself that exists within me and isn’t easy to access because she doesn’t carry light-hearted, quick, daily go-to feelings. She doesn’t tell me that she’s hungry and would love a fried egg for breakfast, she doesn’t tell me that she’s tired or cold or that she would benefit from going on a quick walk outdoors. When she speaks, she wreaks havoc.

This havoc is what has been living inside of me for what feels like months, something inside of me has been off and I’ve not been able to put my finger on it. I’ve brushed it off as period imbalances, the arrival of autumn and shorter days, a bad night’s sleep… I’ve not really paid any attention to what she was feeling, I’ve kind of just looked the other way and hoped she’d disappear.

The conversation that my boyfriend and I had this week by the fireplace made me feel like I was stuck at the bottom of a deep hole that I couldn’t get out of in that moment. Not being able to escape avoided me from covering these feelings up, running away or shutting down to ignore it all. I had to listen, breathe, internalise and especially acknowledge, that this was inside of me and that it needed, and also deserved, my attention. This deeper layer of myself was (maybe still is?) sad and lost because she’s never been completely alone, with too much free time on her hands, without human contact, without things to do to distract herself from and now that she is, it’s probably very scary.

She is me, so I guess I can also say that it is scary.

It’s scary to suddenly have no distractions apart from your phone or books, to have no one to see and to evade you from your own life, to not be too stressed to function, to have little so work and pretty much all of the day free. It’s scary to live inside of the body you’ve never fully seen as yours. I’d spent all of my life (teenager to adulthood) thinking about what other people wanted from me, what I needed to do to make them feel happy, what I wasn’t supposed to do because I’d cause problems, what was fashionable, what was cool, what I needed to give and do to be a good friend, what parts of me I needed to hide or quieten to be liked, what things of myself I could change to be considered pretty… It’s scary to have all of those layers stripped from you and to be left standing naked with only yourself to keep your mind occupied.

I live with my boyfriend, we wake up and go to sleep together, we have our meals together and we do a lot of activities together throughout the day, but we’re not joined at the hip. He does his own thing a lot of the time and I do mine, and this is where it gets scary. There’s nobody remotely close to me who I could have a coffee with, there’s not a single shop in a 40km radius to browse in, there’s absolutely nothing here apart from myself and my life inside of our house, the mountains, the ten 70 to 80 year-old people that live in the village, the wild animals and birds, the sun and the rain.

I’m completely alone and that’s hard to deal with.

My screen time rocketed, my reading did too, my conversations on WhatsApp were abundant, I was a social butterfly. But now I feel like I’m in a cocoon with only myself and my inner voice to talk to. My friends are working, studying or living their own now adult lives with their partners. Summer is over and people are back in their routine, the village is empty because no one wants to spend a holiday-weekend sat by the fire because it’s too cold to move… I’m alone and this isn’t something I’ve had to deal with before. If my friends were busy living their lives before, I could put on a coat and see hundreds of people walking the streets of Barcelona. I could go to a coffee shop and chat with the owner and feed off of that short, heartwarming social interaction. I could walk into a bookshop and see what books other people were picking up and also spend a very long time looking at different books of my own choice… I’d be killing the time one way or another, going to sleep and starting a new day consecutively.

Not anymore, and that’s something I’m learning to live with now.

That conversation with my boyfriend was a hard one, I cried and let all of the feelings out, I journaled and got the thoughts out and now I’m learning how to love myself for who and what I am. I logged out of my personal Instagram account, I lowered my consumption of daily vlogs on Youtube. I now pick up my books when I desire to read and not when I want to be distracted, I ask myself what I need to give myself each day, I try to speak to myself and not bury my life under other people’s and then fall into the trap of comparing myself with them.

I’m learning how to live inside of my own body on all of its layers, even the deep and dark ones too. I hope that if I listen to those butterflies and those things that I try hard to block out that I’ll slowly be able to turn that place into a sunny one too.

Being in the middle of nowhere with no one to see happened without me planning it, so maybe this is my time to dive deep into myself and learn to love myself as I love other people. I can’t expect other people to save me, give me what I need or make me smile, it’s my responsibility and mine only. Other people can always add on to what I already give myself, but I can’t live entirely off of what they give me, it’s unfair to myself and to them.

All of this being said: yes, I thought my life was falling apart earlier this week; yes, I thought I had to change my entire being drastically and, yes I thought it was going to be hard. But when you take one step at a time and you work on things as they come to you, you end up walking to the finish line with breath instead of gasping for air. I hope to reach that finish line when my time comes knowing who I am and what’s been hidden inside of me for probably, far too long.

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See you next Monday at 7:34 a.m.