I can always feel it when I haven’t had enough alone time. I get grumpy — a bit snippy even. I start to dread the plans I was previously looking forward to. Mundane tasks overwhelm me. My capacity for small talk drops to sub-zero.
The last month has been full of loud celebrations and big trips. Between getting engaged, celebrating the weddings of two wonderful couples, travelling from Cornwall to Cape Cod, the past few weeks have felt overflowing with the connection and joy that makes life worth living.
But this week, I’ve noticed the symptoms of my social energy reserves hovering dangerously close to a breaking point. I never thought I was an introvert until I read the actual definition of the word — a person who gains energy from solitude and quiet. I didn’t realise you could be a person who is both outgoing and loves being around people, but who also needs copious alone time to refill the tank.
Upon reflection, I realise that this pull for solitude started early. My parents always gave us kids the space to be by ourselves. After family dinners, soccer practices, and finishing our homework, my brother and I were free to disappear to our own corners of the house while our parents drank wine on the front porch or watched Seinfeld together in the living room. I could sit for hours on the window seat of my bedroom reading my book without interruption. I could wander out into our backyard with my walkman or iPod, sit on the swings, and think about my ~troubles~. I could disappear down into our basement to watch the shows no one else in the family liked — the OC, One Tree Hill, and Gilmore Girls. If it was my turn with the computer, I could shut the door of our office and fall into the worlds of my design in The Sims.
Even with a quintessentially American, hectic schedule of a high-schooler trying to get into a good college, I had that time to be with myself.
When I went off to University, the possibility of alone time shrank to nearly nothing. When you’re sharing a tiny dorm room with another person for four years and spending all of your waking hours with friends, the only real alone time presented itself when you worked out (which I did rarely) and when you were studying in the library. A chronic procrastinator, cramming for an economics final the night before the exam didn’t exactly fill my introverted cup up.
In fact, for whatever reason, the constant social stimulation of university made it feel like being alone was a problem. Something weird. Why would you sit alone in the dining hall when your friend from class is waving you over to her table? Why would you stay in when all of your roommates are going out?
I think I rediscovered the joy of alone time when I studied in Italy for a semester. (Groan, here she goes again.) But in all seriousness, it was my first time living outside of the United States, living outside of a college campus, and living outside of my parents home. With only a cheap italian telefonino, it was a rare opportunity to not be in constant communication with other people.
Living in a foreign city felt like a chance to pretend to be an independent adult. In between spending time with the people in my program and my very minimal classes, I could wander to a cafe by myself to write and people watch. I felt comfortable sitting outside in a piazza peacefully slurping tortelli d’erbetta, drinking wine, and reading my book. This space gave me time with my thoughts to process a recent break-up, the subtly changing dynamics in my friend group, and the beginning of new friendships that would become some of the most important in my life.
But it’s likely that my little Italian sojourn with solitude was not something unique to my own experience, but heavily influenced by the Generation X self-discovery guru, Elizabeth Gilbert. The Eat Pray Love movie came out in 2010, just as I was starting my first year of university. I don’t know what it’s like to be an adult woman without the ethos of Gilbert’s memoir about her journey of self discovery after the collapse of her first marriage banging around in my subconscious. One of my first ideas of what a single woman should be was watching Julia Roberts as a fictionalised Gilbert utter the phrase “La dolce far niente” - the joy of doing nothing.
In the scene where she first learns this italian quip, Gilbert is being lectured by some charmingly stereotypical Italian men. They tell her that the reason she cannot relax is that she is American. They explain that she needs to take a lesson from the Italian way of life — where every person feels like they are entitled to a nice long break every day. If not more than one.
To demonstrate that Liz has learned this lesson, we watch her puttering around her charmingly decrepit Roman flat. She drizzles some gorgeous asparagus with olive oil, peels some beautifully orange-yolked eggs, prepares a mouth watering cup of coffee, and sits on a blanket on the floor to enjoy her breakfast with the morning paper. I don’t for one second believe that sitting on that blanket felt remotely comfortable. But I get what they were going for.
And obviously, the image of that scene was so powerful that it has stayed with me to this day.
Maybe I do over-romanticise my solitude because of some fumbling attempt to re-create the blanket-on-the-floor moment. It’s not that I want to go full hermit. I certainly enjoy living with my partner. I’m excited about the many plans I have with my friends this weekend. I love that our schedule is so packed that it sometimes takes a WhatsApp poll and a shared Google Calendar to try to find space to fit even more fun into our lives.
But all I know is that when I felt the crash coming on this week, what I needed was a micro-dose of some dolce far niente. With the house to myself on Wednesday night, I went for a short run in the sun, stopped at the fancy green grocer, bought myself some flowers and gorgeous produce, and made myself a meal that my partner doesn’t like. I settled into my comfiest sweats, put on a face mask, turned on Season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy, and made myself a cup of my favourite tea.
It was in these moments of quiet meandering that the full impact of what has happened in my life over the last month truly hit me. I get to spend the rest of my life with Charlie and all of the people in our lives that make the little world of our partnership work. Caroline O’Donoghue calls relationships, “A subculture of two.” The realisation that this little sub-culture we’ve built will be life-long only fully sank in as I sat in solitude with myself.
After all, we are the only ones who get the see our entire story from start to finish. Might as well slow down to take in the best bits.
Cheers to the weekend & cheers to you!
Kelley
Love this
As someone extremely social who also craves and needs alone time - I loved this piece!