"Until you get comfortable with being alone, you will never know if you are choosing someone out of love or loneliness"- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

I am 19 years old. I am aware that my age does not define me, but I have the bad habit of relying on it to excuse my short comings, one of which being my inability to be at peace with myself. I do not understand how to enjoy my own company. Any moment spent in solitude is spent desperately attempting to connect with someone else in the near future. I don't know why I do that. My friends laugh it off as neediness, which I suppose is one way to describe it, but it feels like so much more than that. It feels like being alone is like drowning in my own thoughts, that if I am not constantly sending something out into the world, that I am disappearing, simply ceasing to exist.

I don't know if this is another undesirable symptom of being young like acne or angst, or if this is an issue which will plague me for the rest of my life, but it scares me. It terrifies me, actually. I don't know if I am ever going to be able to be on my own. But I can either sit here terrified or try to figure out how to accept my own company as valid. It's not like I haven't tried. I have tried relentlessly to pick up hobbies. I have tried my hand at knitting, journals, ceramics, and so so much more. But nothing distracts me from my lack of communication with people for long.

So, I have decided to embark upon an Eat, Pray, Love-esque journey of my own. I will not be traveling the world in hopes of finding myself because quite frankly, my bank account wont allow it, but I will be trying to explore the depths of my own mind, and sharing with everyone what I find every week. It might be a little too much information to be sharing with people that I do not know on the internet, and I'm not sure anyone will really read this either, but the fact of the matter remains that the only way I am going to be able to get over my fear of being alone is by completely exposing myself so that there are no secrets to plague me when there is only me.

I hope I haven't bored any of you, and maybe this is not the correct forum for this sort of thing, but here is another attempt at trying to find myself.