What even is an “adult time out?” I must admit, when I first started doing this, I thought it was a bad thing. I made it a year and a half of college without many changes; I was enjoying my classes, had friends, and was competing for a position on my sport’s team. However, especially now looking back, I do not know that I was ever really happy. Did I get by? Yes. I had learned to survive; I had learned what things I could get away with to help me be happy at that particular moment, but often, these were things that were making me happy for the wrong reasons. I was happy because I had someone who would go shopping with me, regardless of who that person was. The sad part (the part that I realized later) was why I was doing it.

I was doing it to avoid being alone, or what I thought was being alone.

I was the kid in high school that was looking forward to the independence, to being away from everything that had become so normal. I wanted to establish my own life, and my own set of expectations for myself. However, my excitement to finally be on my own blinded me to the harsh reality of the fact that I was, in fact, alone. Sure, I had roommates and teammates, but I had had the same people in my life for the past 18 years, and they were no longer there.

So how does this tie into the “adult time out?” A year and a half into school, I was truly alone for the first time in my life. I had spent my first year and a half of school in a relationship with someone that made me question everything I had ever established about myself. I had thrown everything I thought out the window in hopes of keeping the relationship alive, and when I finally started to fight for myself (as I should have been the entire time), I was lost. I learned that I couldn’t make myself happy if all I was trying to do was make someone else happy.

That’s where the “adult time outs” come in. After everything happened, I was more lost than I ever had been in my entire life. I had my first anxiety attack of my life, and it both confused and scared me. Where did this come from? Why do I feel like a horrible person for trying to do something that should make me happier?

So I started looking for places to escape. The city of Chicago is a beautiful place, and there were lots of places to explore right at my fingertips. This time, instead of looking for someone else to make me happy when everything got to be too much, I ventured out to one of these places. Sometimes I brought one of my closest friends with me, but most times, I went by myself. I went with the sole purpose of being by myself and being able to just relax and not worry about anything other than getting my thoughts and feelings under control. At this time in my life, I had many, many moments when I was on the verge of a breakdown and this was all I could do to even remotely keep myself together. College, both fortunately and unfortunately, has the ability to do that to a person.

When I first started doing this, I thought I was crazy. Who does this? Who can’t deal with their own life enough that they have a need to escape halfway across a city just to get some peace of mind?

It took a conversation with the psychologist I was seeing at school for me to realize that this idea, however novel it may seem, was not crazy in the slightest. Sure, maybe the degree to which I was doing it was a little strange, but that was what was working for me. She described it to me as a sort of coping mechanism, and commended me for taking the initiative to tackle my problem head on. She also, ironically, relayed that she does the same thing in her office sometimes; after being there for a while, she has to take a break and go to one of the local stores (in this case, Target) so that she could just be away from everything for a little, regroup, and then come back and resume her daily routine.

Why “adult time out,” though? That was the psychologist’s term. The way it was described to me was that, as a child, a large part of the rationale for a part putting a child in a time out when they are in trouble is so that they have the time to cool down, reflect, and change their behavior in the future. In college, no one is EVER going to put me in a time out (hopefully). Instead, I had to choose to do it to myself, something that I never thought I would honestly be able to say that I did.

The best part is: I would do it again. And plan to anytime in the future. Now, instead of fearing my time outs, I embrace them full on.