Who would have thought that our childhood fantasy Oh, the Places You Will Go was really about exploring who we are and not just about exploring the world? Oh, the Places You Will Go was my personal favorite by Dr. Seuss because it talked about adventuring the world all by yourself, but little did I know that his book was really about understanding who you are and being able to be okay with the parts of ourselves that we don't necessarily like. While Dr. Seuss showed how much fun it is to explore, he also got brutally honest by writing this in Oh, the Places You Will Go, "All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot. And when you're alone, there's a very good chance you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won't want to go on."
Dr. Seuss in the above quote has never been so right, being alone is scary, it means we actually have to look at ourselves without the ongoing approval from our peers on social media. Our insecurities tend to show when we are alone and vulnerable, which is scary because our insecurities are not aspects of ourselves that we are proud of. No matter how intimidating your insecurities may seem, you can destroy them by confronting them head on, but in order to get vulnerable you have to be alone, something our generation seems to stubbornly avoid.
From taking a walk by yourself without headphones, to sitting alone and writing about your day, alone time is something our peers fail to have. As a generation, we are never alone, from Facebook updates, emails, Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage to Twitter, we never are able to quiet our lives and be completely alone. Alone time does not mean sit in a room by yourself for an hour and think, it simply means to take a walk by yourself with your phone on airplane mode or to sit outside somewhere and think about what's going on in your head. When you are by yourself you are able to be who you really are, and are able to take the mask that you put on for your social media accounts off.
I have been lucky enough to be able to call Budapest, Hungary my home for the semester but it came with a catch: I would not know a single soul, I was going to a new country and a new school completely alone without anyone to fall back on but myself. The idea of being completely alone made me extremely scared, but it turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to me. I have learned that being completely alone teaches someone many things but one that really stands out to me is this:
Being able to be happy with who you are.
Being happy with who you are now-a-days is extremely hard to be because our happiness is superficial, since it is decided by how many likes we get on Instagram or how many comments we get on Facebook. Social media has been able to pump up our generations self esteem all while it is secretly ripping it apart with its unachievable standards. The goal that social media creates for us is to be liked by all, but it ignores the fact that you have to like yourself before others can like you. By being able to be alone and unplugged for most of my time here in Budapest, I have learned to love myself because I am able to understand who I am.
While alone time is hard to do in a culture that promotes being seen and heard by all, it is essential in destroying the façade of yourself that you have grown too accustomed to. I have been able to understand that it is okay to not be liked, which was one of the hardest realizations I have faced since I have grown up needing the satisfaction that comes from being liked. I have been able to love myself because I take the time to be alone and think about what I just experienced and how I feel about it. Talking about our feelings is also something that our generation likes to hide, we do not like to get real with ourselves because once we grasp who we are becoming, we realize that we are turning into someone unrecognizable, which is scary.
Alone time may seem intimidating, but without being completely alone you can't understand how to defeat your insecurities which will allow you to be able to love yourself. Being vulnerable and alone are terrifying to our generation because it means we have to be okay with who we are at our core, which most of us aren't. However I believe that if you challenge yourself to an hour of alone time a day you will be able to slowly tackle your insecurities allowing yourself to truly be happy with who you are. Dr. Seuss may have been writing to empower children, but his messages are able to empower us all, being alone is scary but not loving yourself is even scarier. Like the inspirational Dr. Seuss said, “Your Mountain is waiting. So...get on your way!"
