Let's not call this one anything too particular. Let's call it the thoughts pouring out of the thought basin of someone who just spent four hours driving back to school, after a densely-packed Thanksgiving break. Let's not call it a self-help piece, or analytical, or anything like that. Let's just call this one a meandering path through the woods.

I love alone time. I'm sure this fact comes, in part, from the fact that I'm an only child, and one home-schooled until college at that. Having my own space, and my own time dedicated to myself and my own thoughts and desires, was a given to me for a long time. The idea of not having that was preposterous. I loved playing with Legos, but would always rather play alone if I was building things. This sounds pretentious as all hell, but I suppose that even then, I valued having some kind of personal "workshop." I built doors, sure, but I built walls, too.

When you get older, things get harder. As an angsty teenager with too much hair and too little sense of belonging, I desperately wanted to fit in somewhere. I could feel myself drifting away from some childhood friends, and was determined to find something new where I could fit in. I drove myself crazy overthinking this, and kept on doing it and doing it and guilting myself for having ever valued that alone time.

I think the apex of the whole thing was college. I roomed with a friend, and for the first time in my life experienced the sensation of sharing space with someone else 24/7. I get how a lot of people do it, but for me, not having some little closed space that was just mine was jarring, unsettling, and...gross, for lack of something more eloquent. Grossness is seldom eloquent, I suppose. After a couple months, I started to dread every time I would return to the room. It wasn't out of any particular malice for the person I was living with, but malice for our situation. For the fact that there were two beds, two desks, two dressers. Two lives, and only one room. More than all of that, still, I dreaded it out of malice towards myself. How dare I make such a stink over this? This was how people lived, for fucks sake. Get your sheltered head out of your own ass, Jay. This is the world. You're not from here. You don't belong here, and you won't, all because you care too much about having a cave to crawl into.

This is where my head was at for a while.

I don't write those words now and think "ah, yes, the words of an emotionally healthy person." I had to finish that first year and return home before I began to reconcile things. That was the summer when I found the group of friends that would become closest to me (and still are), and none of that hinged on constant social interaction. I found other people who cared just as much about having their own space as I did. We would all get together, have great times, and then have some time in our own bubbles. I finally was able to recall the value of those doors and walls I had loved creating for myself. Those walls didn't keep anything out, but they kept me in when I wanted to be kept in.

It's okay to push for a single room in college, or a one-person apartment. Maybe you need a whole place that's just yours, or maybe you only need your own bedroom. My crisis during my freshman year was that, with no place that wasn't being shared with others, I felt like I couldn't think the same way I can in a space lived in and curated solely by me. In one's own room, corner, house or yard, one is their own king.