About three weeks ago, my mom and my sister left for Korea to visit my dad as we used to do every summer. But because Fulton County Board of Education insists that I take a semester of P.E to graduate, I had to stay behind in the Land of the Free, so I could finish it online over the summer; so that essentially means that my 17 year-old self is home alone for three months. Oh, boy. My colleague Kyongyun Chung recently wrote about her similar experience, about her and her dad living without her mom for a month. She talks about struggling to figure out how to work the washing machine to her frequent clashes with her dad as they try to make it through and from the glance of it, she sounds like she’s having less than a pleasant time (to put it mildly.) So if she’s is having such a rough time and she has her dad on her side, it stands to a reason that I should be having the most stressful time of my life. I am in completely alone with three months of no adult guidance, I should have no idea what to do, I should be feeling lost and scared.

So the question is: am I? No, not really. In fact, the last few weeks I’ve spent alone has been the greatest thing in the history of everything ever. I can indulge in my guilty habits like dancing while vacuuming, gorging on foods that my health-centric mom would’ve never allowed, blasting music that I couldn’t possibly play in front of my 10 year-old sister or singing along to Ariana Grande on top of my lungs (probably shouldn’t have made that one public but anyhow.) But it’s not just me goofing off (although it is mostly that,) my time in solitude has been incredibly educational. It gave me the space, time, silence and peace to do a bit of self-discovery and self-challenging; in the short time that I’ve been alone, I realized I liked cooking, urging me to look into more projects (I’ll let you know how my macaroons turn out). I also discovered incredible vistas and beautiful driving roads all within 20 minutes from my home that I didn’t even know existed. Then, there is all the time for me to think about myself and the world around me, to philosophize and answer important questions like, "How are crabs so wise?"

In a more serious note, though, it’s not just fun and games, there are a lot of responsibilities that comes with being home alone for such a long time, more than I would’ve rather hoped. First, my mom left me with the seemingly daunting task of making sure our rent is paid every month. On top of that, there’s a list of my perilous responsibilities: waking myself up during finals week, studying for my upcoming ACT without getting distracted into the abyss of YouTube, keeping myself fed, doing laundry, washing dishes and finally, keeping the house generally neat and tidy. All very essential, all much more difficult than my mom made them out to be.

During my three weeks of staying home alone, I’ve learned a lot and I’m probably going to learn a whole lot more over the next thirteen weeks. I’m thankful that I’m getting the practice of living alone and taking care of myself now under the scrutinizing eyes of my mom via Skype rather than having to learn from scratch in college miles and miles away from home. This experience got me to feel just a little bit closer to adulthood (although there is not much that screams adult manliness in a 17 year-old guy trying to bake macaroons) and I am looking forward to all the challenges and adventures of living alone over the next two months.