A social butterfly is a slang term for a person who is socially dynamic, networking, charismatic, and personally gregarious. I am not a social butterfly. This isn't to say that I don't enjoy a good night out (or in) with friends, because I do. This simply says that I don't work the crowd. I don't fish for friendships. I don't put myself where I don't feel like I'll be comfortable being. Thus, I don't intimately socialize with many people. I have written before about the "mutual dislike" and how I am a firm believer in not pushing friendships where a mutual dislike is present. While I still stand by this policy, it landed me in the second month of my sophomore year at college, with one really good friend and a couple of backups. In a word: lonely.
Yes, I was lonely. I longed to be known. This is why I don't mingle well. I don't want to just meet people. I want to know and be known by others. Friends. Intimately. And because I historically let my friendships happen naturally, I didn't have a lot six months ago. As College: Year 2 rolled around, I quickly learned that the friends you make your freshman year don't always stick around. Through a series of unfortunate events, I felt disposable. Again: lonely.
I've titled this writing, "How To Be Okay With Being Alone (and Why It Matters)." Let's start at the end. It's important to be okay with yourself when you're alone. This doesn't mean "single," this doesn't mean "alone by choice," it means what I have described in the previous passage. It means you feel unneeded. Like you could change your major, your school, your city, and things would still run as usual. I was convinced that I was not anyone's "go to" person and never had been. No one had thought me to be a good enough friend to share things with me. To run to me when they need help. To call me in the middle of the night to talk them down. I was always the one doing the running. Just once, I wanted someone to run to me. I was almost 20 years old and no one had ever looked at me the same way I looked at them.
And I needed to be okay with being lonely. I needed to be okay with being by myself. It's not that I didn't like myself, it's that I never had to be alone with myself before. It's important to know who you are outside of your friends. This is normally stated to young people "in love," that they need to know who they are outside of each other. But you can lose yourself in a friendship more than you can in a romantic relationship. I find myself guilty of this more than I am comfortable with.
Let's fast forward half a year to the current day. Obviously I'm now okay with being myself by myself and I've come out of my emotional slump stronger and more confident than I was. How did I get here? Emotional expression. I talked about my feeling a ton. To everyone. Okay, not everyone, but to a lot of close friends. I wrote about what I felt. The first step to not feeling lonely was acknowledging that I felt lonely. I went to a therapist for while so I could have a listening ear outside of my social circle. I also just let time heal the things that were broken. Things weren't going to be fixed the day after I talked about them. I had to be patient with myself, my friends, and my situations.
Most importantly, I had to keep reminding myself that the way I felt things were was not the way things would stay. My loneliness was not a permanent state. Knowing that I was on the road to peace with myself and my relationships gave me hope to be better.
