Let me start by saying that college is just weird. As college students, we are conditioned to accept life in constant companionship. We do everything with at least one other person in the vicinity; we sleep with our roommate never more than a few feet away, we eat pretty much every meal with our friends, we go to classes with people, walk to and from classes with people, do homework in a crowded library… even while showering, it is normal to hear your neighbor wander in. We are always in the company of others. Alas, you can imagine the culture shock I experienced when going from a semester of college to a month of living in an apartment completely alone as I interned for a literary agency in New York City.
Not knowing many people in New York and living in solitude, I was introduced to an uncomfortable and unwavering feeling of emptiness. Suddenly I craved nothing more than conversation… some people call this loneliness. Being a self-proclaimed people person and having spent the last two years in college, I was not used to having to entertain myself, and keep myself company…and I didn’t really like it. Between obsessively FaceTiming friends and family during meals, spending extra time discussing the weather with the coffee barista, and discussing the fire escape routes for all the apartment buildings on 12th street with the security guard, I worked to fill my time alone with other people -- anyone.
Eventually, however, a couple of weeks into the month, something changed. I began recognizing several repressed hermitic qualities in myself, and was pleasantly surprised. While I used to get home from work dreading the long night alone I had ahead of me, I now craved the moment I could enter my apartment, change into sweats, and relax completely on my own terms. While I used to think of eating takeout alone while watching "The Bachelor" as plain sad, I now thought of it as the ideal night. It took me a bit, but I did finally understand the beauty in living alone. That’s not to say I didn’t still appreciate companionship for meals, and the occasional visitor, but I didn't feel quite so dependent anymore. I realized that I had never before taken quite so much time to listen to the thoughts in my own head, and I was relieved to realize that they actually entertained me.
Now, as I head back to college to embark on my second semester, I think I’ve changed enough fundamentally in this past month to need to work alone time into my schedule. Spending so much time surrounded by and conversing with others, we have been developing ourselves from the outside in, letting the tastes and preferences of our friends rub off on us. But we must not forget that from time to time, we should work on ourselves from the inside out – figure out our own tastes, biases and idiosyncrasies, based on careful self-reflection and thoughtfulness.
