During my solo walkabout to South Dakota this summer, I found myself becoming innocuously jealous of the couples I spotted chatting over cups of five-cent coffee at Wall Drug, posing in front of sunsets over Pinnacles Overlook in the Badlands or helping each other over a particularly difficult area of Cathedral Spires Trail in Custer State Park. My trip was a difficult one in as many ways as there are souvenir Wall Drug shot glasses. And like shots, each one was relatively easy to knock back on its own, but when tallied over the course of an evening—or solo vacation—their collective power knocked me on my ass with a realization so sobering, it was enough to drive this abstainer to drink: I am alone.
Being alone is hard. There is no real way to learn how. You can’t learn by reading books (genius Franzen’s How to Be Alone is an amazing read, however) or listening to other loners share how they do it. The only way to learn how to be alone is to, well, be alone. I’m not talking about learning how to travel alone (though I must admit, equipping myself with tips on how to read highway maps, survive climbing up and down the 50-foot ladder carved into the Badlands’ Notch Trail and stay awake while making the nine-hour drive home in the middle of the night would’ve been helpful—and prudent). I’m talking about how to enjoy our own company, how to sit with ourselves and in our feelings when we don’t, how to self-soothe when the world kicks us in the teeth, how to treat ourselves when we become so sick of us that we begin to manifest late-developing dissociative identity disorders so we can have someone else to hang out with. We can ghost a person after a bad first date. We can get divorced after years of evolving separately but not together. We can’t ghost or divorce ourselves. We’re always here; that is, until we’re not, memento mori n’ all. So we may as well join him, her or them, and learn by doing and being alone.
The irony is, many of us are alone, whether or not we’re one-half of a couple (or one-third of a thruple, if that’s your bag), and if the latter, whether or not we choose to admit it. For me, I’d rather be alone with myself than be lonely with another. Being alone comes with an authentic, core self-awareness that I wouldn’t trade for a mutual, crust-level understanding with a partner that can’t survive the divergent boundary created by its own tectonic shift.
Allow me to explain that last bit. I use the geology reference because one, I like rocks, and two, it works. The earth, like people, is comprised of layers. From shallowest to deepest, they are the crust, mantle, outer core and inner core. With the exception of the crust, no one has ever explored these layers in person. Being alone gives me time and opportunity to come to know my own layers, down to my inner core where shit is turbulent and hot, like earth’s. And when coupled, I want to know my partner down to his or her inner core, too. Here is where I dare to assert those two things may be mutually exclusive; that is, it might not be possible to know another’s inner core without first knowing your own—who you are, what you value, what you need, what you have to give.
The similarities between earth and people don’t stop there—both are always changing. Heat from radioactive processes within the earth’s inner layers cause the plates covering the crust to move toward or away from each other. This movement is called a tectonic shift, and when the movement is away, it creates a divergent boundary, which can result in potentially catastrophic events, earthquakes among them. My aforementioned divergent boundary reference in relation to couples is my attempt to say that there is risk in not feeling safe enough to be our authentic selves around the ones with whom we’ve chosen to, yes, that’s right—be our authentic selves, in all their evolutions and iterations. Unheeded, this risk can result in a different but just as potentially catastrophic divergency, one that can shake a relationship to its core.
Consider this another reason to learn how to be alone. It may sound counterintuitive, but it can only make us better one-halves of a couple. It shouldn’t be the only or primary reason we invest in being alone however; we alone are reason enough.
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