Self Intimacy, Redefined

I’ll be honest, I really thought I had it all figured out.

About six months ago, I took my first trip totally alone. I drifted romantically through bookstores on the coast of Washington during the day, and soaked in oil baths and sipped coffee at night. I cooked and shopped and read and ate in restaurants alone. The whole thing was really cliché of me. I really thought I was living out Eat, Pray, Love; but thinking I bore any resemblance to Julia Roberts was the first mistake of many. 

At this time in my life, all I could preach about how much I loved being alone. About how beautiful it was. How I was so ridiculously in love with my life and with myself. I was convinced that I had really made it through the thick of things, and I loved to spend time without anyone else. Honestly, I assumed way too highly of myself at this time. My ego was so desperate to prove I could be so consumingly independent, and be so fine. This was definitely due to the state of my crippling codependency. I had an answer for everything. I thought I was going to go to the university that was 40 minutes away from my family, get an amazing job right out of college, and marry my high school sweetheart of too many years. 

I was in a place that would never prompt me to ask any questions to the universe about what the future would hold. It was this safety net that made me think I had achieved such total confidence in solitude — because I had my family, my long-term boyfriend, and a safe college future to come home to. I could prance around in towns that were not my own, all by myself, with so much self-conceit, because I didn’t truly have to fend for myself. 

Romanticizing this journey of connecting with myself was so damaging to me. Looking back, with a fresh set of eyes, I realize I was wrapped up in a world of aesthetics and self-care and naivety. I was refusing to note how shallow it all was, how I wasn’t facing the actuality of my situation. I was so, so comfortable in my life. That comfortability created a bubble of security around me that prevented me from ever overstepping the bounds of my codependency. I physically could not remove the rose-colored glasses.

Eventually, though, they got ripped right off.

In the last month or so, everything has come crumbling down. No more safety net. No more state school next to my family. No more boy-I-thought-I-was-going-to-be-with-forever. The university that I was certain I was going to get into waitlisted me. Right afterward, with the understanding that I was going to be packing it across the country, I went through my first breakup. The classic thing, you know. Long-distance won’t work, we’re so young, we’ve never been with anyone else. All of my security blankets were being peeled back, and I was desperately scrambling to hold onto them. This season has forced me to confront the fact that I was never as confident as I thought I was. I was never as carefree and wild as I was portraying. I was able to convey this aura of self-reliance, because it was being supported by such an easy, linear life.

I am learning now how to be alone for real. I am learning that it is not all sunshine and carefully home-cooked meals and face masks and drinking green tea in a diner alone. Until you truly face an unprecedented future, and until you experience being so totally lost, you cannot learn how to be alone with yourself. I am learning that growth and confidence do not come from comfortability. It does not come from whisking yourself away from your life for a weekend, and doting upon how you appear to be doing to others.

True independence is messy to obtain. It is so hard to be with yourself. Alone with your thoughts. Alone with the inevitability of the future. Alone with the weight of the past. Unlearning all of the things I thought I knew about being a free spirit was never going to be easy. I thought that drawing myself away from the predictability of my life was going to be the learning experience I needed. However, I was never going to achieve this level of intimacy this way. I was forcing myself to try and grow when it was not yet my time, when I had not yet met myself at my lowest. 

Now, my future looks different. I am going into it so alone, so far away from home, and from everything that once made my present so simple. I'm leaving Washington state in the fall for Utah. I have been thinking that maybe the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains, as far as you can see on every inch of the horizon, might be a good place to start to find myself. For real. This fall, I will be taking my first honest trip alone, into an entirely new future. 

If you are lost, if you are truly experiencing being alone, and have no idea what the next chapter holds for you: you aren't the only one. If your heart is broken, and your home is shrinking smaller and smaller in your rearview, you aren't the only one. If you have no clue what your next move is, you're not the only one. We are all just finding our way back to ourselves.