56: One year of living alone
Reflections from solitary confinement (lol jk)
I have officially lived alone for one year.
One year ago, I outlined what I hoped this experience would be for me in “Girls just want to live alone (and have fun).” TLDR: I was ready to “be responsible for myself and my place in the world—to shape and be shaped by my own first place.” I vowed to check back in after I felt I had truly given things a go, comparing my great expectations to my lived experience. I don’t know about you, but I feel like living alone for a whole year definitely constitutes giving it a go. So, here I am, ready to reflect on what this past year has meant for me: what I’ve learned, what I have yet to learn, what I’ve loved, and what I’ve… begrudgingly accepted.
First off, I am happy to report that I was completely right about what living alone would do for me socially. Last spring, I wrote about how exhausted I felt after living with my parents for an entire year of social-distancing and lockdowns while balancing my relationship and friendships with a new work-from-home job. I was quite literally never alone given that my entire family was working from home at the time. I missed missing other people. By moving into my own place, I was hoping to provide myself with the opportunity to feel lonely and I ultimately did just that.
I work through my 9-to-5 in a quiet and comfortable setting of my own design. The only distractions are the ones I create for myself. Once I wrap up each workday, I’m confronted with the welcome choice to either continue to be alone or seek out the company of the people I care for. I’ve written before that I spend about half of my week alone and half with other people, finding solace in the literal sense of balance I dreamt about a year ago. I’ve so enjoyed inviting others into my space—something that used to make me pretty anxious. Nowadays, I enjoy playing host to my boyfriend, friends, and family members. I stock up on wine and mixers. I order in food, I put together snack spreads, and sometimes I even cook (gasp!) for the people I love. There’s something wonderful about holding physical space for the people in your life and making that space comfortable and inviting.
One unexpected difficulty that I have encountered on this front, though, is that I have faced a lack of community within my apartment building itself. This is self-imposed, as I approached living alone as a woman with a fair degree of caution. I did not advertise that I was living alone to any of my neighbors and didn’t actively introduce myself to hardly anyone beyond saying hi if we bumped into one another in the hallway. I don’t regret this decision as it’s afforded me a necessary sense of security, but I do wish that there were less well-documented instances of women living alone in apartments and being preyed upon so I could move about the world more freely!!! This last bit has not negatively defined my experience, but I do think it is important to note when it comes to discussing what this has truly been like for me socially. All in all, in dedicating more time to myself, I’ve felt more refreshed and excited to dedicate an equal amount of time to being with the people I love—just like I hoped I would.
That all being said, “living life in a less ‘mediated’ way,” as I once put it, and creating space for my own stillness has been harder than I expected. While I have wholeheartedly enjoyed the fact that I can now choose when and what I tell other people about my day-to-day life, I have also found that being the only person in my space day after day can lead to an uneasy relationship with this default sense of silence. Admittedly, I have a really hard time carving out time that isn’t sonically polluted by podcasts, video essays running in the background, too-long TikTok doomscroll breaks, or half-watching Forensic Files while I work every now and again. I seem to crave the sound of human speech to a degree I never have before living alone. As writer Lauren Bravo puts it, “‘comfort listening’ [can] act both as surrogate company and as a kind of cognitive buffer, protecting us from unpleasant thoughts”—like feelings of isolation or loneliness. The extent to which I’m drawn to “comfort listening” suggests a sense of unease with my own silence and a post-pandemic overreliance on audiovisual stimulation that I’ve worried about since last year. I don’t often feel lonely, but I do feel that I have a hard time relaxing while alone because I am so unused to what solitude can sound and feel like. I’ve had to be very intentional about how I spend my evenings alone as it’s so easy for me to get caught up seeking traces of audiovisual human company instead of spending time in my own company doing the hobbies I love. It really has been more of an adjustment than expected.
But more often than not, I ultimately convince myself to spend my free time with myself in meaningful ways. I need so much less time to vegetate now that I live my life for and by myself. Last year, I could barely bring myself to do anything other than run, write TWHI, or play Skyrim outside of work and socialization. In the past year, I’ve gotten back into reading consistently, finishing at least one book per month. I taught myself how to crochet and continue to make cross-stitch projects for the people I love. I started solving crossword puzzles daily and have filled many work breaks and late evenings with sudoku. I’ve played a wider range of video games this past year than ever before (though I do still struggle with a bit of a guilt complex when it comes to spending my free time on video games, so I seldom finish them 🤘😔🤘). I’ve caught up on some things I’ve always wanted to watch, from Jane Campion’s The Piano to Mare of Easttown and Russian Doll. All this being said, I still have trouble writing consistently outside of TWHI and I’m still working on rediscovering my love for music discovery. You can’t win ‘em all, but my winning streak is a lot better than it was!
I’ve even seen improvement in the ways I look after myself. Forging a better relationship with cooking and cleaning while living alone was inevitable. It wasn’t even an option for me, really. I was raised by one of the cleanest women of all time, so it’s been funny to see the intense need for tidiness my mom instilled in me start to rear its head over time. It’s like I was a clean-freak sleeper agent until activated by the metaphorical trigger phrase that is living alone. Before leaving for trips, I do in-depth cleans so I can exult in my cleanliness upon my return. I constantly wage war with my floors and velvet couch—one can never vacuum enough. Before guests come over, I give in to my innate compulsion to tidy most everything in sight (within reason—I hate dusting). The only (big) difference between me and my mom is that I take longer breaks between cleaning sessions, but I can happily report that I do a pretty all-encompassing apartment overhaul every week. On the other hand, I am still languishing a bit on the cooking front, but I’m working on it. Over the past two weeks, I’ve made myself multiple whole meals and even treated my boyfriend to a home-cooked iteration of Emily Mariko’s salmon rice. This is a big deal for me, sadly. My nature is still to subsist off of green smoothies and noodles and combining enough weird, disparate parts to make a whole meal… But I am going against my nature to create new habits when it comes to dinnertime and it’s starting to work! Progress!
One of the hardest parts of living alone has honestly been decorating. I still feel as though I’ve made the least progress on this front, which is often frustrating for me as a creative person who has an interest in design. I’ve documented how hard it was logistically for me to move into my place alone and make big decisions about how to fill the blank canvas that once was my apartment. A lot of the excitement I had about the actual process of moving in and making this space my own was deadened by how hard that process turned out to be. Even so, I’m proud of myself for pushing on through these issues and ensuring my place was easy to love. I’m happy to report that I’ve created a space that features a consistent and soothing ~color story~, an effective use of space, many wonderful plants, and a good mix of interesting and neutral pieces. I feel just as cozy in my living room and calm in my bedroom as I’d hoped I would. But things still feel unfinished. I only framed the majority of my wall art as of this March, and most of it still sits on my floor while I sit in a stalemate with my indecisiveness. It’s for this reason that I have very few “nice” pictures of my finished apartment to share in this piece. Even after a year, it’s not quite there yet. And while that’s a disappointment to me, I’m trying to be gentle with myself as I’ve never owned a space of this size before. Nevertheless, I have a lot to celebrate in the sheer fact that I accomplished my overall goal: I’ve provided myself a place of comfort and inspiration.
Fortuitously, Haley Nahman (Anna and I gush about her Substack Maybe Baby all the time) wrote an essay entitled “Why do we aspire to live alone?” right before I began this reflection process. It’s been a healthy counterpoint to my self-admitted glorification of living alone—“…yes, I am absolutely aware that I’m overidealizing living alone in a one bedroom apartment,” I wrote in 2021. The other Haley encapsulates a lot of what I was feeling (and what she once felt herself) in her piece:
“There’s a sustained mythology around living alone in America, where personal achievement is foundational to our understanding of growth.”
“Having complete responsibility and power over my domain seemed like the ultimate rite of passage into adulthood.”
Helpfully, though, Nahman challenges this impulse toward self-sufficiency and its root causes.
“Humans are social creatures—cooperative and interdependent almost by biological definition. So if it’s not actually natural to our species to be self-sufficient, why is it considered aspirational? […] It’s definitely a less natural way of being, at least if you’re taking human history into account. That we’ve come to see it as admirable says a lot about our culture: our commitment to individualism, our emphasis on personal wealth.”
“[…] I think there’s room to reinterpret our shared understanding of how people’s living arrangements should progress. Rather than an important rite of passage, maybe living alone is just one experience of many that can shape a person. By emphasizing it—not just individuals living on their own, but individual, nuclear families, too—I wonder what kind of society we’re aiming to create.”
I think the ideas Nahman puts forth are essential. So many of us have undoubtedly internalized the American mythos of independent living and achievement, and it makes sense that it would bleed into how we seek to live—this lifestyle that is said to both signify and breed personal growth through solitude. In the past year, I have definitely come to terms with some sense of unease in my aloneness; a feeling that living alone has been more of an adjustment than expected even with my introversion. And it is important to consider the ways in which “financial or personal growth [can] lead to different, better kinds of communal living instead of an exit from it altogether,” in Nahman’s words.
But I also can, without a doubt, say that I have grown over the past year specifically because I was living alone. I can also say that I needed some kind of disruption in the way I was living because I was starting to feel like my development had been arrested. In the face of COVID and unexpected financial difficulty, I chose to turn down the dream academic and professional opportunities I’d worked toward over the course of a year, leaving my future cloudy and my goals scattered. In the midst of this period of hardship and uncertainty that’s marked all of our lives, I was able to cobble together an alternative future for myself out of the remains of what I’d once aspired to. I don’t think it’s unhealthy or even “bootstraps”-minded to acknowledge that fact. In my original essay, I also noted that women seldom live alone at all—there’s a reason why there isn’t a female-coded equivalent for the term “bachelor pad.” I am very grateful to have been able to afford myself the freedom to experience life in my own company—an opportunity that men have had access to since time immemorial.
Nahman posed this essay as an opportunity for dialogue, and I’ve been heartened to see that the two top comments follow a similar line of thought.
“I think the most noteworthy part of living alone is the way it attunes you more sharply to your own thoughts (of course, taken to the extreme this can be a bad thing). There’s a quote by Claire Louise Bennett that comes to mind: ‘In solitude, you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.’ There’s a beauty in solitude, I think, especially when a lot of modern life is engineered to distract us from ourselves and from thinking too deeply whilst conditioning us for a kind of performance. Being in the company of others is certainly vital for personal growth and development, but I think we sometimes undervalue the power of being alone, without distraction from our own minds and patterns. It’s also interesting to discover how you are when you don’t (even unwittingly) alter your behaviour for someone else—your weird habits and proclivities. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be a rite of passage for everyone but it can certainly be an illuminating one that enhances your comfort with yourself. I often long for more spaces for community and I believe very much in interdependence but I don’t think living alone has to diminish those things. If anything, it should make you seek them out more actively because they’re not built into your home life. From my perspective, so much of life is recognizing the inevitability of being alone to some degree—we are always alone in our heads. I think it’s worth getting comfortable there.” - Sophie
“I would argue that gender plays a role in how you spin it. Women, as caretakers/overseers of domestic sphere have only relatively recently been given the cultural green light to live alone. For centuries, a woman lived with her family until she married or she went to a convent (yay! all-female communal living) or she drifted/opted into spinsterdom, and most likely due financial dependency reasons, lived with at least one family member. So while I totally hear you on the valorization of individualism etc., I think the aspiration to live alone (at least for women) can also be seen through the lens of social progress, and not just social fragmentation/dissolution. I would also point you to A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf :)” - Evvie
I stand by what I said in my first piece, as it all still rings true:
“…Living alone is something I’ve earned. It’s a way of life I’ve made possible for myself through hard work, determination, and saving more than I spend. It’s a gift to myself after an especially difficult stretch. It’s giving myself higher stakes—ones I’ve proven to myself I can rise to. It’s reminding myself ‘I did this and I am doing it’ day after day and being proud of that fact.”
While things have been imperfect, they have been as south-facing and sunlit as I hoped they’d be. I’ve grown into my own space, and I’m excited to see how I continue to grow outside of it. If you’re thinking of living alone, I wholeheartedly implore you to give it a try. You’ll never regret time spent getting to know yourself better. You’re all you’ve got! Anyway, cheers to one year of being the best roommate in the apartment by default. :’)
Buying myself flowers. Specifically yellow tulips. I never regret adding a fresh set of blooms to my grocery haul. As Dan Reeder put it, “The tulips on the table / mean that spring is on the way…”
My Paper Shoot camera! I recently invested in a sustainable, eco-friendly digital camera that is made from recycled materials (the body of the camera is made from sturdy paper!). Alex has a film camera and usually totes around a disposable, and I was always jealous of the warm candid shots he’d take throughout our time together. That being said, I was not excited about the process of developing photos and also worried about the disposable nature of… disposables. Then, I learned about the Paper Shoot through TikTok. It captures photos digitally with a film-like aesthetic, storing them on an SD card so you have immediate access to your shots. But the photo-taking process is super similar to a disposable: all you have to work with is a viewfinder cutout and a button, so it promotes that same sense of present-ness in the moment and joyful imperfection. It also offers video capture and four filters: normal, black and white, sepia, and blue. It’s incredibly light and compact, so it’s easy to tote around. I highly recommend this little guy to anyone and everyone!
It’s Earth Day! Last year, I planned to buy a trash grabber and set out picking up waste in my neighborhood and around Minneapolis. This never happened, and I deeply regret that fact. This year, I am setting out to invest in one right after work today and I’m going to spend my evening cleaning up my street. I’m excited to make trash cleanup part of my weekly routine as we move into warmer days. Highly recommend making a little Earth Day goal in the face of climate anxiety and the overall irrepressible sense of doom we’re living with as of late! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!