Reformulating My Relationship to Solitude

Quite often, the things we resist, run from, or feel anxiety about — the things we fear — eventually become the things we desire most down the road.

That was true for me, especially regarding my relationship to the feeling of being alone… which for years since my early twenties, I’d attached a negative label to.

I associated that feeling — the sensation of looking around my apartment & seeing no one else there — with being unlovable, inadequate, or somehow off track.

I would fall into mental loops when alone, usually characterized by a general sense of disorientation & confusion about who I was or what I was supposed to be doing with that space and silence.

I chose to feel it as loneliness. That turned to pain. And my sustained pain morphed into depression.

A few catalysts and contrasting experiences over the years that followed shook me awake, reorienting & recalibrating my inner compass.

I was shown a new lense through which I could choose not just to see, but to leverage and love, time in quiet solitude.

I just couldn’t see the gradient that contained the gift within the context of my old mental framework.

Back then, I didn’t have the consciousness, the perspective, or context to fully appreciate it.

It’s funny. Now, it’s my drug.

I can’t imagine not having it.

Fair warning: once you start spending time alone and get over the hump, once you can transmute the dense energy of loneliness into the euphoria of uninterrupted solitude, there’s a pretty sweet high that you can tap into… and this ability to hear the depths of your own truth in a way you just can’t do while in the presence of other people.

I don’t despise company, and I’m not antisocial. I just know what I need, now. I didn’t want to face it before. It took a bunch of bad roommate experiences and a failed live-in relationship to get me to realize what I really wanted.  

Through those processes and periods, I discovered that the thing we’re most fearful of is usually in-and-of-itself neutral. It’s just one dimension, one facet, one form that life can take.

The thing is, we have an inherent expectation that some things should be unpleasant while others ought to be joyous.

But that view, I found, is itself flawed.

We actually dictate how we experience every circumstance life presents to us.

Ego — expressing as expectations and assumptions, in this case — is what stands in the way.

The hard truth is that if you view something through a negative lense, if you place a negative charge on it, it’s because you want to view it that way.

We create the meaning that we tag onto the ups-and-downs of our life.

We create our relationship to everything.

What if you took off the lenses of dissatisfaction, or sadness, or unfulfillment… what if you forcibly replaced them with a new vantage point JUST to test that new perspective?

Could that help slowly shift the flavor of that particular scenario?

It did for me, but it took both time & perspective for it to manifest.

If you simply can’t reassign meaning, or change how you feel, then just lean in.

Relax.

Understand that time, by default, will realign you.

Time has a inherent harmonizing quality to it, an unseen mechanism geared to guide us toward truth, acceptance, and awakening.

In other words, time yields perspective.

Perspective is the best antidote I know to gaining expanded understanding, which then unlocks all sorts of novel realizations, magical epiphanies, and personal recognitions.

Sometimes you just have to wade your way through the muck to get there.

Yours in service,

𝓜𝓲𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓮𝓵



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