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
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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.