I’m gonna be really honest. Well, not like I’m NOT honest here, but, you know what I mean. I’m not a fan of being alone. At least not for long periods of time. You’d think as an only child, I would be use to it by now. Don’t get me wrong. There are some real perks of being alone. I actually really like that I live by myself. Until I think about that episode of “30 Rock” when Liz Lemon talks about how she fears being a single woman alone, that she may choke on her dinner and there would be no one there to help her. This horror hit me hard one night when a particularly large piece of sushi decided to go down the wrong pipe.

Living alone means, I only have to worry about me. Cook for me, clean for me, walk naked around my apartment and not care what others think. But that kind of “alone” is fine with me. “The Lonely” is different. “The Lonely” is having a 12 hour work day and all you want is someone to massage your feet. Or crying at a movie that makes you think about your father, and wanting to be held. “The Lonely” is cooking a bomb ass Red Sauce and wanting to share it with someone, but realizing it’s gonna be stored in the freezer so it doesn’t go to waste.

I use to be embarrassed that I would ever say out loud that I don’t like being alone. Very few people actually like it. You get more things done in your solitary. But you also have a million little voices talking to you, making it a their mission to point out that you are in fact…alone. The more that I think about it, it’s the voices that I hate. They want to run around saying “You should be with someone.” “You should scroll through Instagram and see all your happy couple friends and lust over what they have.” “You are alone for a reason.”

That my kiddlets, is “The Lonely” talking. The little gnat of a voice that points out that you can’t survive in your solitude. But one of the things I am learning and appreciating is that I can live in it, and survive and grow to love it. “The Lonely” is causing me to listen to the voices and rather than take pity on myself and my situation, but work on some shit. I mean real shit. Shit that scares me. And perhaps even admit a few things.

Case in point, I admit a big desire I have to be in relationships is to find validation in myself. I like the compliments and the looks a couple gets when they walk into a room together. It’s like you announce to the world, “See this….this is an US. Not just a ME!” And that need for validation, to understand WHY I need it comes from hours spent in “The Lonely”. Rather than running from it, I decided to listen to it. While I’m cooking, or taking a shower, or doing Yoga or meditating.

And that’s when it happened, I slowly became ok with it, because it didn’t define me. I wasn’t alone because I was without someone. And being alone wasn’t the end of the world. This time alone is making me, as cliche as this sounds, work on some crap that I needed to work on. So that one day, when there is “someone”, I won’t feel like I need them to be an US. I would have dealt with being alone, listened to “The Lonely” and come out stronger person. This also means I will be drinking severals bottles of scotch on my own. But I ain’t complaining about that either.