I used to not be able to sit alone in a restaurant. Would feel the selfconsciousness of it too strongly. Would take out my phone immediately just to have something to do with my hands, something to signal to the room that i was occupied, that the aloneness was chosen and temporary and fine.
It was not fine actually. It made me uncomfortable in a way that told me something worth paying attention to.
I had conflated being alone with being lonely for so long that solitude felt like a problem to be solved rather than a state that had its own kind of value. If i was by myself, something must have gone wrong. If i was not surrounded by people or noise or activity, i was somehow failing at the social part of being human.
It took a deliberate and uncomfortable season of spending more time alone to untangle those two things. Not dramatic isolation. Just choosing sometimes to eat alone without the phone. To walk without headphones. To sit in the evening without filling the quiet with something.
What i found in that quiet was not loneliness. It was something closer to myself than i had access to when i was constantly surrounded by noise.
Loneliness is an ache. It comes from disconnection, from feeling unseen, from wanting company that is not there. Being alone is just a physical state. You can be alone and completely at peace. You can also be surrounded by twenty people and lonelier than you have ever been.
Learning to be comfortable alone changed how i showed up in company too. When you can be okay with yourself in solitude you stop needing people to fill something. You just enjoy them instead. That is a completely different energy to bring into relationships.
The ability to sit quietly with yourself, without needing to escape that silence immediately, is one of the more underrated things a person can develop.
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