embracing solitude (and the lack of it)

“A writer is never alone, he is always with himself”

— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

Although at my current age, the number of siblings I have is large (two from my father, five from my mother) I grew up primarily as an only child. In fact, I mainly grew up with my paternal grandparents as their “final bird from the nest”. I’m not sure if it was a culmination of not feeling wanted by my biological mother, feeling like a burden to those who did raise me, or the lack of those siblings in my proximity during my childhood, but I have always struggled with the feeling of security whilst  alone. My thoughts start to unravel at times, like a blackhole that takes and takes and takes until it cannot anymore, leaving me surrounded by chaos both mentally and physically. 

My grandmother says I’m messy, “like a pig,” she would say. I’m a firm believer that what we tell children they are plays a big role in who they actually become without intervention of those notions we are meant to internalize. This one, being messy, it fostered a sense of self-hatred that never seemed to be unfounded. It was true, I was not as organized or tidy as my family, nor as put together as I wanted to be, either. I thrived with a routine, and although I excelled at school and other interests of mine, my backpack was always littered with bits and scraps of paper and broken pencil lead, and receipts and crumbled up worksheets that I had forgotten to finish (primarily these were for middle school biology, which I’m not sure how or why I never seemed to recall the homework for it– perhaps this is why I never saw the calling for science within myself until high school). This messiness seemed to litter not just my backpack over the years but my mind and my life as well. Disorganized thought became my primary understanding of myself– that I was reckless in theory but not in practice, that I was seemingly preoccupied in my own world even when all reason called for me not to be. The number of car accidents I would find myself in from age sixteen to twenty three would easily suffice as evidence of such. 

Perhaps being alone in hindsight was always so terrifying for me because I had become accustomed to the idea that I wasn’t truly capable of handling life on my own. That I needed someone there at any moment’s time to watch out for me, to think clearly when I was on standby, to prevent me from making mistakes. I had grown up with a plethora of examples of what not to do, and somehow forged my own path of mistakes that were their own new, unique set of issues (see: car accidents). I was unequivocally clingy, in all aspects and in all relationships, both platonic and romantic. In my adolescence and early adulthood, I had not bothered much with boys, nor could I to be fair, because the line of teenage boys and young adult men were not exactly lining themselves up to date me, either. I was singularly focused on school and friends for much of that time, but I was acutely aware that I was loud, obnoxious even, and supremely the largest girl in any of my friend groups. Growing up heavier was one of the pinnacles of my self-understanding, and even now after halving my weight four years ago, I remain in my mind this same girl. There are times and instances where I don’t remember what it was like to wear size fourteen or sixteen jeans, or to have to ask if they had a bigger size of a dress I liked only to be told that there was not. There are moments I even forget that I was bigger at all, but the impression it leaves on you to be bullied for your size for as many years as I was is permanently scarring in a way that does not leave you except temporarily. In my youth I had also chalked up my inadequacy to my weight and appearance alone, fostering this idea that my personality was not to blame in any regard, that I was always a victim of judgment based on my looks alone, and that if young men were simply less shallow, I would have been a catch. I neglected any inward reflection on how I portrayed myself outside of how my body portrayed me. Growing up and losing weight, the interest of men heightened, but the fear of inadequacy shifted instead to my mind, my messy, clingy mind. Even as a kid, I picked a friend and would rarely be caught without that friend at any moment until they grew tired of me, and then I would hop onto clinging to the next person who would let me. This fear of being alone, this fear of inadequacy, this fear of myself festered over the years, only getting worse with time and change. 

However, ripening to the age of twenty four this coming may, I have become acutely aware of my own distaste for solitude, and have grown tired of clinging to people who inevitably leave like my mother did– quickly and without looking back. When my most recent ex-boyfriend and I split, I crumbled, not just because our relationship had tanked and we still live together, but also because the rest of my life was crumbling with it. I had become a shell of myself in many ways in the span of our relationship, withering away to only two main characteristics of the whole: teacher, and girlfriend. The first characteristic was by chance and then by choice and then by necessity. 

I came into teaching the same way a lot of people enter job fields that do not reflect their actual degree– as a means to an end of waitressing. At the time, I was still working at a restaurant where I worked most nights on to-gos, but when I served the main floor, I often was having to take food to the bartop, where I would come face to face with a coworker who had taken advantage of a situation that I could not remember. I would say that I relived it every time I brought a plate of pork chops to that bartop, but nearly two years later I still cannot recount much of that night. I know that my words to another coworker that evening were that I was “under no circumstances interested in having sexual relations” with said bartender at work, but a slip in the ice (causing a mild concussion) and several alcoholic beverages later, I found myself waking up unclothed in that bartenders bed, with no memory of anything past first arriving to the house with a group of people. For much of the remainder of time working at the restaurant, I was dissociated and lonely. My friends at the restaurant all cowered away from me like a broken doll in a toy factory, slowly but surely shying away until I felt cornered into silence about myself amongst any of them. I needed an escape, I needed a salaried job, I needed freedom from the chains of tips and meager wage and the very precarious pit of sadness I was facing. 

My original plan after graduation was to move in with my dad, stepmom and aforementioned two siblings and use the year I would’ve spent in college (if not for graduating early) to study for the MCAT and apply to medical school. On the course of doing so, I found myself serving as a means to make money enough to continue to spend all nighters in Ihops and hours at starbucks and buy the occasional new “going-out top” for my weekend adventures back to my college town to be amongst my friends, much to the dismay of my family. However, the studying stalled often, as I was easily distracted by my phone or friends, or the intense desire to do anything else but read about the various hormones and biological processes I had been studying for what felt like ages. I grew wary of medical school, of my ability to handle the specific specialization I wanted to undertake, and even the notion that it would be another four years before I was actually free to live on my own. 

I even went back to school at a nearby college for a semester in hopes to undertake a new path– biomedical engineering– and started looking into moving out on my own whilst seeking that degree. However, as I was attending the first semester for it, I encountered that fateful night with my coworkers and receded to nothingness. I wanted to sleep all the time, I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to exist, much less attend classes for an entire new program of schooling. So, I began to job hunt for something more secure that didn’t require more school. Ironically, that meant attending school in a new way.

Teaching fell into my lap the way one might say it was fate for me to do so. I had always loved the idea of teaching, but shied away from it because of the common knowledge that it paid terribly, especially in my state. I had watched my aunt and uncle struggle to some extent with finances for much of my early life and didn’t want that for myself. However, when I saw the yearly salary for my current job, I was swayed. I originally interviewed for a biology teacher position, but alluded to an elevated interest in teaching chemistry and wound up teaching both coming in mid-year without any prior knowledge of any true teaching technique. Unprepared, to say the least, I pushed to excel anyways, as perfectionism was and still is at the core of my nature. Probably an internalized result of my own self-proclaimed inadequacy at work; the idea that if I was not good enough but strived for perfection I may one day feel adequate at something, anything. I was enamored with teaching in the beginning. Despite the lackluster pay, and the numerous difficulties of the job, it felt like it was a true calling for that first semester teaching. I felt a renewed sense of purpose and I was doing well at it. 

I spent most of my summer off (without a second job like I had promised myself I would obtain) moving into the house my ex and I share and building new powerpoints, creating new assignments, and attempting to undertake much of the extra work I had struggled to keep up with in advance for the upcoming whole school year. I entered the fall of 2023 with hope, excitement, and minimal fear. I had developed friendships within my department and believed that this was the first of many years working with them. I had switched to five classes of chemistry only, meaning the nights spent grading two separate courses were over, and I would likely see some students with familiar faces from my two classes of freshman biology the semester prior. I’m not exactly sure when things shifted for me that first semester, but it was different from the start. My students before had their own set of troubles and I was still learning so much about what it was to be a teacher in general, but with experience and gained knowledge I only felt more and more incapable, my youth and lack of educational background developed into imposter syndrome. My new set of students, while endearing and fun, were nuisances of phone usage and incomplete assignments (many lacking submission whatsoever) and no matter how many invigorating (albeit, annoying) speeches I gave them, they never seemed to grasp what I was trying to get across. I grew more and more impatient with their severely lacking math skills and flawed reading comprehension and at times even when going above and beyond for them, I became resentful of doing so. I found myself coming into school an hour early each day and leaving one to two to three hours after the final bell pushing to produce an impact, which never came. 

The truth of the matter that I faced was that the students who wanted to learn or cared, would do so despite the efforts I made and the same could be said about the students who did not. I felt incapable of making a genuine shift for the students who retreated to their phones when confused or dismayed at the amount of work (even when minimal) that existed before them. Then came the illness. On a weekend night, my ex and I had spontaneously bought tickets for a band he liked. When we got there we ordered a drink and I had lapped my redbull and vodka mix up in a span of about twenty to thirty minutes whilst the opener played. In a short span of time, my eyes grew heavy, my body grew tired and I felt an overwhelming dizziness that began to stir fear in myself. I told my ex I needed water and to sit down for a moment, unsure of what was happening. In a matter of minutes, I would be sprawled out on the floor, unconscious. When I came to, there was a crowd of people around me, including one of the paramedics from the venue, and my ex was gathering the car to take me to the emergency room. He had called my grandparents, who would meet us there. When we got into my car, I reached for a coke left half finished from the drive to the concert and drank slowly, arriving to the ER in a short span of time. They took my blood sugar and an EKG and ran a few minimal tests, not to include a CT scan despite hitting my head on the concrete floor of the concert hall, and ushered me into a hallway bench seat where they would hook me up to an IV to help alleviate my potential dehydration. I was sent home before long, with a warning to check with my primary care physician about looking into this further, since after the coke can I was still only at a blood sugar of 67, where 65 was the lower end of normal. 

A few weeks later, my primary care doctor had sent me home with a blood sugar monitor device and over the next few weeks I would find myself pricking my finger while shaking profusely only to see a number in the 30s staring back at me, a number low enough for many people to cause seizures although I never had one. With this knowledge, my primary care physician did an initial work up of blood tests which came back inconclusive and he referred me to numerous endocrinologists to try and seek out answers. Amongst this time, I grew very sick from the spreading germs at the high school, and came down with what an urgent care deciphered as “either acute bronchitis or pneumonia” and shed an additional fifteen to twenty pounds in a matter of two months, and ran a low grade fever each and every night for those two months. I was growing weary of teaching, my health was in shambles, and by that November my ex and I began to really encounter issues that seemed to strain our relationship to its final threads. I was once again reminded not only by myself but by everything surrounding me that I was not good enough, that I had been living above my means not in the financial sense, but in worthiness. 

I began to retreat from the devotion of teaching, I began to grieve a relationship that was slowly dying, and above all began to slip back into a dark pit I had known so well in my earlier years. I felt like I was entering a tunnel where instead of a light being at the end, it was caved in and I was trapped. The darkness seemed to engulf me for several months, and I was acutely aware that everyone who looked at me saw that at the forefront of my being. Even my students could tell I was retreating into myself. So, when my ex and I officially called it quits in the early beginning of the new year, I finally hit rock bottom. I was still waiting for an endocrinologist to call me, I was running out of sick days at work, and the person I had once thought I would marry was suddenly clear in his depiction of not loving me, perhaps never having truly loved me. 

For the entirety of the first month of this year, I welcomed the darkness. I counted the remaining pills from an old surgery habitually, just to ensure that if I ever truly decided to call it quits it would be enough. In the lasting sadness of early March I even wrote a note and toyed with the idea of planning my own demise for real. In the coming days after, I would burn that note in the firepit in my backyard and have a renewed sense of resilience, but the sadness came in small waves still. I started seeing a therapist again in late February and upped my dosage of my antidepressants with my psychiatrist and in the last few weeks have devoted myself entirely to self-discovery. I, for the first time in my entire life, enjoy the solitude I have found in a quiet day to myself. I have started to read and write again, and have even made numerous friends whilst out and about. 

It is so funny to think about the mental spaces I have been in since November, since January, since even the beginning of this month. With every hardship I have faced in my almost two dozen years of living, I almost let this year defeat me, and instead in some weird intangible way have delved into the opposite of defeat. 

I am leaving teaching, though it will be one of the hardest things to let go of, because it is killing me. I always was the type of person to view my ultimate career as a calling, something I equally loved and was good at, something that defined me. Teaching felt that way for a good portion of its beginning, but in the crumbling and then in the wake of the crumble, I realized that so many parts of myself that were intrinsic to my happiness were left behind because I had allowed myself to be taken wholly by being a teacher. In the crumbling and in the wake of the crumble, I realized that I had held on too tightly to my ex for the entirety of our relationship, forcing him to feel needed rather than wanted– a feature of my clinginess and my keen ability to let others take care of me when things piled up and I felt incapable of handling it all on my own. I began to see the flaws in my personality that I had once not too long ago forsaken and blamed on my weight. Now the only thing crushing my bones was my own ignorance to my character, and what role I played in other’s lives. It has dawned on me that part of this crumble was this self-reflection, of which I let myself drown in the depths of self-hatred for not only the truth that it was but the span of time I had gone without acknowledging it. It is not that I believed myself to be perfect, but that I kept myself so busy and in company often enough that I avoided the solitude that enables that kind of self-reflection. And I had stopped writing, one of the ways I was ever truly honest with myself. 

Now, on the verge of leaving teaching and in the application to an accelerated nursing program, I find myself devoting time to writing as often as I can. Reading, so that I may remember what it is to spin words this way and that to pose the true questions I needed to start asking myself: who am I? Where am I headed? What do I really want? I can’t say I feel largely closer to having all the answers but I do think there is progress in the questions being asked themselves. I know that perhaps my love for the creative can be fostered more with a nurse’s schedule and finances than a teacher’s, and I know that I fiercely want to want people rather than need them – a newfound independence that I had previously not sought after– and that I wanted to know myself better, like myself, even. I know that I don’t merely want to survive anymore as I had been doing for so long. It has dawned on me that back in the first few months of this year it was less that I wanted to die, and more that I was tired of surviving for the sake of it. I wanted, and want, to live. 

And so in the undertaking of this task, I bought a domain and created this blog, in hopes that a financial subscription to writing my thoughts out will propel me to stick with this, and perhaps foster a community for myself online where others feel and understand how I do, where I can put it all out there for strangers on the internet despite how terrifying the ordeal of someone I know (and people I do not know) reading it all. It is funny what fear does, it is true that the “fight or flight response” is the perfect name for such a reaction, because I have done both so profusely these last few months. It has taken some time, some tattoos, and some self-love to remain fighting, but I am determined to fight until the fear is not rooted in pain. I don’t think fear ever goes away, that being fearless is, in its purest form and described by Taylor Swift, as not the lack of fear itself but the lack of giving into that fear. Being fearless is in its greatest essence, knowing the fear and being brave in response to it. Being a fighter long enough that the flight mode is secondary to it. 

I have hope for myself, and I have so many stories yet to spin just the right way in due time. I know that self-discovery is in part, an ever-evolving process that never ends because the human condition is also to change with time, meaning the hunt for who you are never really ends; the notion that learning to understand yourself can be one thing today and entirely another tomorrow. And yet, instead of running away as I have done for so long, I am pressing forward with a furocity that I have never truly seen in myself. I no longer feel chained to being the person others have wanted me to be, but instead being the person I want to become, and being invigorated by the seeking of it all. I have spent so much of my life exhausted by the uncontrollable need to be perfect to someone that I never stopped to ask myself if I was happy, truly. Even if the road to all of this has been unconventional, it resonates with me that sometimes in the wake of crumbling, in the aftermath of reality kicking in where I don’t know what my health issues are and how serious they may be, that whatever time I have left (short or long) is precious and I have forsaken the time I have been given so much already. I have wasted so many days trying to make others see something within me that was never there, and ignoring what was inside all along. 

I don’t want to waste any more days, and in a very new installment, I do not fear that many days will include solitude, the solitude that once terrified me. I welcome it now. It is funny to me, that when you stop trying to be someone else it is much easier to digest yourself alone. That when the number of people you feel forced to be is reverted back to the singular, the thoughts are easier to parse through and put into words that make enough sense to read back and agree with. That returning to writing and written word has enabled me the space to fear my own thoughts less, even share them with the world. 

I do not know where you are, reading this. I probably don’t know much or anything about you, but I do know this: I’m grateful you’re reading this, and hearing me. I’m grateful that in a world where the internet can simultaneously connect and damage the humans that use it, it has opened the door for me to take pause and restart on life. You see, when your world starts to fall apart around you, the first thing you do is try to mend it. You try to glue pieces back together and fit things in places they were not originally placed in an effort to return to wholeness. But life is not a bit of pottery. Instead, we are all soft clay, still malleable in our personhood, still able to start again and make something new. I am not so naive as to think that I will not have to make something new many more times again, as I have so many times before thought I knew where I was headed and what that path looked like. Instead, my trajectory has changed, my course of action is to respond instead of react. I think the beautiful thing about being soft clay is that all the parts of you that came before are still there, nothing breaks down into pieces so small as to become dust in your fingertips. Every bit of myself that existed before is still a part of me, but the ebb and flow comes with turning of the wheel, with the careful hands that guide the clay to become something new. It is both a blessing and a curse to simultaneously be the artist and the art, but there is something to be said about being art in itself: there is no bad art. There I can find peace in knowing that being perfect is not the goal since there exists no perfect art of being. I find solace in knowing that perfection has always been a foolish finish line, and allowing myself to be imperfect leaves room for my art to grow forever. 

It leaves space for my mind to embrace solitude (and the lack of it).