romanticize a quiet life
romanticize a quiet life
postcard 30: on solitude versus loneliness, and what it means as someone who loves being alone
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
prelude
Welcome to postcards by elle! Every week, I send out a weekly postcard, which includes a list of everything I read and watched that week. This is free, so free and paid subscribers will all receive this. To support my work, please consider upgrading your subscription!
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
—The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Every morning, I wake up and go through the same motions: I make my bed, open my curtains, drag my feet to the kitchen, and make a hot cup of some no-caffeine tea. Set that on my nightstand, sit on my bed, and crack open my journal.
There’s a quiet stillness in the early morning hours that I love. I write pages in my journal—sometimes it’s just a rephrasing of yesterday’s thoughts, or sometimes it’s something completely new. I have a terrible habit of intellectualizing my every thought but repressing every emotion, so journaling is a balancing act for me. One day, I’ll repeat the same thing into oblivion and then it’ll click; my brain will become silent from the deluge of thoughts crowding every crevice, and I’ll feel my heart finally grasp the full array of emotions in technicolor.
Epiphanies, or small deaths of ambiguous thoughts, only happen when everything around me falls quiet. In the soft symphony of my train of thoughts, I reach conclusions, realizations. Ones I know that are wholly mine, that I can own in its entirety. Living by the ocean has allowed me the joy of taking beach walks whenever I have to make important decisions—maybe even life-changing one, because decisions at my age have unfortunately been that consequential lately. I will ask my parents and my best friends about what they think I should do, the road taken or not taken, and then I will reach a decision on my own in the company of the calm ocean breeze.
Solitude is not an emotion—it’s a state of being, but it feels much more clear-cut than any other actual emotion. I know exactly when I feel it. Solitude is when everything around me falls silent. It’s magical—a soundless apocalypse in the way the world suddenly reduces to nothing but myself. I can hear time passing without the needle of the clock ticking. Not in a way where I am constantly chasing time, and then allowing it to chase me in return. But in a way where we both coexist, time and I. The world can turn and orbit around the sun, and I will still feel at peace.
People often get solitude conflated with loneliness. While they both tangentially pertain to ‘being alone’, they are widely different. Solitude, as I just mentioned, is the physical state of being alone. But loneliness is not the state of being anything. You can be lonely alone, you can be lonely with other people around. Loneliness is simply feeling alone, wherever you are. There are obvious bold emotions (though they still have nuance): Happiness. Sadness. Anger. And then there are emotions like loneliness, where the feeling itself is incredibly compound and complex.
How do you describe an emotion that feels like a negative space? Loneliness is the absence of something - the absence of human company, the absence of affection, the absence of connection, even the absence of having something to look forward to. Loneliness manifests differently in everyone—while loneliness is something that everyone knows how it feels, nobody feels it the same way.
You can choose when to be alone, but you cannot choose when to feel alone. It’s an unwanted feeling that worms its way into your mental space and, more often than not, overstays its welcome. It is as fascinating as it is melancholy, and I think that is why I seek different interpretations of it in literature and movies; for an emotion that focuses on the absence of something, the ways in which they are portrayed through writing and art is astoundingly beautiful.
I think this is why loneliness is oftentimes romanticized in literature and films—there is a misconceived notion that this is when artists thrive the most, that there is great work born of loneliness. I wonder if people think an idealized version of loneliness is solitude, although the two are vastly different. This is slightly tangential, but I don’t think being distressed or miserable needs to be a prerequisite for producing good art, although it sometimes seems like it is.
I don’t think I have ever felt lonely while in a chosen state of solitude. I’m a big introvert and homebody by nature, so choosing to be around people is more of a choice for me than being alone. I think a lot of people think that being an introvert means that I’m shy, which I’m definitely not. I like being around people and I love meeting my friends or calling them if they live far away from me, but I like being alone a lot. I love everything about it, and how it’s an extension of myself. From my postcards (actual postcards) to my nightstand to my bookshelf—I love that I can look at it and see every element of my personality mirrored back.
At the start of the year, I wrote a post on things I learned in my 20s (so far). One of the things I wrote about was about how everyone should learn how to do things alone. I think life does get fractionally easier at least, if you learn how to be comfortable in your own company. Appreciating solitude (and true solitude, without scrolling on a device), seems to be the basis of self sufficiency. Eating alone, reading alone, going to places alone, are all therapeutic for me.
Ever since I moved near the beach, I realized just how much time I spend walking around and not looking up. I’m always looking at my phone or walking around with my earphones in, meaning that I’m never truly just looking around. Taking a few moments to just walk, no phone, no music, and take in my surroundings is such a special part of my day.
Again, maybe this is the introvert in me speaking, so take this with a grain of salt.
interlude i: what i read this week
I read two books this week—Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews and Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. I loved both so much. I knew I’d love Milk Teeth because I loved Saltwater by the same author. But Excellent Women is a lesser known book and I didn’t know much about it (or anyone who read it) going in, and it ended up being amazing. Both are currently rated 4 stars, but I might bump either up to a 5 if I’m still thinking about it in a few weeks.
I’m behind on my Goodreads updates again, but I’ll work on it in the next few days!
Here are ten articles I read this week:
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
“Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
Can we fall in love completely without completely losing ourselves?
How Loneliness Generates Empathy and Shapes Identity
Loneliness is hell: debilitating yet formative. Can we avoid the pains of loneliness yet enjoy the pleasures of solitude?
“When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much.”
Why romanticising your own life is philosophically dubious, setting up toxic narratives and an inability to truly love.
Crying While Reading Through the Centuries
What does it mean to cry over a book?
More people than ever say they’re feeling pressured to look and be the best. It’s taking a toll.
The Collapse of Self Worth in the Digital Age
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
A Life of Caravaggio in Sixty-Nine Paragraphs
“1. They tortured him of course. 2. More precisely, they carved up his face – “sfregio,” it was called, a ritual disfigurement intended to inflict permanent and visible dishonor on one who had disrespected the wrong people.”
(Side note: I understand that I didn’t write these articles, but please don’t copy and paste all 10 of these, literally in the exact order, on your own Substack or Tiktok! The list is my content because I am curating it. I see this happening so often and it just feels a bit disheartening because I spend a very long time each week trying to find a perfect blend of articles. I hope it goes without saying that there is a difference between having a one or two article overlap, and 10 for 10 in that exact order.)
interlude ii: what i watched this week
I had a busy week so I watched one movie this week. I rewatched Brooklyn, which is one of my favorite movies. It is so heartbreaking and beautiful and every single person displays stellar acting.
Here is my Letterboxd! I will put all my September updates this week as well.
I am actually still sticking with my Grey’s Anatomy rewatch past season 8, which is unheard of for me. I’m now on Season 12 (I leave this on in the background a lot), and I can feel myself wanting to stop soon. I will probably never catch up with the most recent season because…why is it still going on?
Here are the video essays I watched this week: this video on Matisse and color, this video on Gone Girl, and this video on how Kodak invented snapshots
postlude
things i love: bianco latte perfume, tiny jellycat keychains, blue book covers, d’alba double serum cream (so good for colder weather), penguin english library books.
There’s no place like my room
Such a nice piece! I was recently reflecting on solitude. It was feeling a little bit heavy lately, despite loving it. But every time it happens, I know I'm glad I get to be alone when I need it.