How Being Lonely Helped Me Find My True Self

Most people associate loneliness with negative feelings. I won’t lie, being lonely isn’t fun in the beginning, but after the first couple months, a new feeling started to arise within me.

Myself during the beginning of being lonely

I don’t like painting a pretty picture when the truth is anything but pretty. I don’t like sugar-coating words so that they go down better. I like honesty and I’ve been told that I’m a little too honest. So, be aware, I’m coming at you with nothing but honesty and some parts are ugly.

Loneliness SUCKS.

It’s not fun.

We all grow up thinking that a large portion of our success in life is from the people we surround ourselves with. In high school, it was all about who you knew and how many friends you had. There was always that kid that had no friends and sat alone, what did his/her peers call him? Weird. You are taught amongst society, growing up that being alone is BAD. If you aren’t surrounded by friends, something is wrong with you.

Loneliness is a state of mind!

If you tell yourself that being alone makes you less of a person, loneliness will never be a positive experience for you. If you care about what other people think of you spending time by yourself, loneliness will be a negative experience for you.

Rules for being happy in your own company:

1. You have to stop letting other people’s opinions matter to you. It is your life. If you like basket weaving, weave the hell out of some baskets. Ignore your neighbor, Karen. She judges you because she’s unhappy.
2. Being by yourself is NOT a sad experience. It does not determine your self-worth. It does not make you weird.
3. Embrace the lonely. When you do things alone, you don’t have to worry about bothering anyone else. If someone else doesn’t like basket weaving, so what! You love it and they don’t have to be present. DO IT ALONE.
4. If you look at loneliness from a positive perspective, you will approach situations differently. When you are with a group of friends, it’s hard to be true to yourself when there are other people involved. That’s normal. People tend to back burner themselves in the presence of the ones they care about which leads to my next point.
5. You come first. When you finally realize this while you’re alone, your entire perspective changes. You can do whatever you want, however you want. There’s no one around you to influence you differently.

People who judge others that embrace being alone are missing something within themselves. I think that they want to be okay in their own company but they either don’t know how or it terrifies them. That makes me sad for them.

When I began wanting to spend more time by myself, I started discovering all new parts of myself. I was completely shocked that my anxiety and depression improved once I got comfortable in my own company.

The parts of me I discovered while being alone:

1. I’m actually a very mellow person. I always thought that I was high strung and had be active and going constantly, but I am not that person. I actually would prefer to sit on my bed with a murder documentary playing while journaling. I can do it for hours.
2. I like World of Warcraft. I gamed growing up, but I stopped when my life got so stressful. A close friend introduced me to the game and I play it all the time by myself. I do research on my character, locations and even professions. I was just kind of surprised with myself.
3. I strive to be organized in life. When I stepped back and looked at my house and craft room, I was in shock. I realized how cluttered my life had become. I immediately started organizing all parts of my house and it made me feel so much better and accomplished.
4. I started caring about my finances. I realized that when I wasn’t setting aside time for myself, I was always going which meant I was always spending. I never saw the outside perspective of my own life. Now that I give myself alone time, I set up budgets and save money. I’m more mindful.
5. Finally, I developed a standard for my self-worth, and it didn’t include toxic people. When your afraid of being alone, you hoard people regardless of how they treat you. That’s what I had done with a few people in my life. When I spent time alone and realized how happy I was, I developed this standard for other people in my life. I was done being treated bad and taken advantage of.

I have been happy with my alone time for two years now. I look back on the sad girl from five years ago and I wish I could tell her that everything will be okay. I would have never imagined myself being okay by myself.

My best friend always jokes that I’m gonna kick him out of my life, because he can’t compete with how happy I make myself.

He doesn’t know this, but that is the best compliment I have ever received.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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