How To Survive Living Alone For The First Time
Living by yourself: that is a scary thought, if you ask me. I don’t mean without your hovering parents or those annoying roommates you had the first few years of college; I mean literally all by yourself in an apartment, alone. The first few years of college are easy, you usually live in the dorms and have friends, your roommates and your parents to help you get through college, but then you become a “real adult” and you move into a real apartment.
You now have to learn how to do everything on your own. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll still have roommates and you figure out this whole “adulting” this together, but some people aren’t so lucky and they end up living all alone.
I’m in that boat, and I can honestly say, I love it! I have always been that “loner” type; so living by myself is one of the best decisions I have ever made. If you’ve never thought about living alone—or you think it’s weird, especially in college, it’s not as bad as it seems. Living alone opens so many more doors than you would ever expect. You can literally do anything you want, however you want, with no one telling you how you should do things, or what you should do and when. Sure, you have to figure out how to do this whole “adulting” thing by yourself, but if you’re lucky, you’ll have your parents help—a little bit.
When you live by yourself, you become WAY more self – sufficient, simply because you have to. You learn how to do everything yourself because if you don’t, you’re screwed. There’s no one there to help you, but that’s not always a bad thing. From personal experience, living alone has made me learn and even re – learn so many skills that I didn’t know I had.
Believe it or not, the hardest part isn’t learning how to pay bills or grocery shop, or even how to keep an entire apartment clean. The hardest part is actually getting furniture in your apartment after being supplied furniture for so many years. You can’t sleep on the floor forever, so a bed is number one, but also the most expensive, everything else will come with time. If you’re lucky enough, or it makes sense, ask for a lot of apartment stuff for Christmas or a birthday. Parents love buying that stuff, because the only other time they will get to is when you get married, and they don’t want to wait that long if they don’t have to.
Learning how to pay bills is the next important thing. You already did the hard part, turning everything on, now you actually have to pay for the things you’re now realizing you use every day. I will admit, for the first few months I called my dad and had him talk me through how to do the best thing ever, called “auto pay”. This means you pay it one time and for the rest of the months until you cancel it, the company takes that money from your account automatically so you don’t even have to worry about it. When you have school and work to worry about, that is one of the best things out there.
You may not believe me when I say it, but living on your own is one of the best things you could do for yourself. Becoming independent, away from your friends, and especially from your parents, forces you to learn a lot that is necessary to be an “adult.”
