Sitting with Myself

On solitude, survival, and learning to keep myself company

I spent most of my life surrounded by people, afraid of being alone. I didn’t realize that constant motion, relationships, motherhood, and work were all ways of avoiding what lived inside me. Learning to sit with myself has been both the hardest and the most healing thing I have ever done.

From the time I began forming memories, I hated being alone. In some ways, I was trained to hate it. My mother’s father died while she was pregnant with me, and instead of grieving alone, my grandmother moved in to help care for me. And help she did. Family lore has it that she never left me alone. She worked during the day, but at night, she was my constant companion.

We shared a room until I left for college. At first, it was because we didn’t have space. But once my older sisters began moving out, starting when I was just seven, I kept her there because I couldn’t fall asleep without her.

Each night, she lay beside me until I drifted off. She was my first love. My biggest cheerleader. My security blanket. She was my protector before I had protector parts of my own.

I am unequivocally grateful for her. She likely kept me afloat during the chaos of my childhood. She soothed every fear, so well, in fact, that I never learned to soothe myself.

As I grew, my discomfort with solitude grew with me. I am, without question, an extrovert. I may avoid big crowds, but I come alive in connection. Being alone has always left me unsettled. At least until recently.

It wasn’t something I saw as a problem, not until much later.

By high school, I was in my first real relationship. I fumbled through awkward ones until I met my college boyfriend within weeks of arriving on campus. That relationship lasted years, even though I used to joke it was a one-night stand gone horribly wrong.

After him, there were others, one especially serious, until I met my now-husband. I love where we landed. I love him. But it’s worth noting: I’ve never existed as an adult outside a romantic relationship.

In those years before marriage, I sometimes had a new partner lined up before saying goodbye to the old one. I didn’t cheat. I wasn’t trying to deceive anyone. I just didn’t know how to be alone.

Marriage and motherhood solved that, for a while at least. I had children sixteen months apart while finishing my Ph.D. I didn’t leave a single inch of space for myself. I was harried, exhausted, and anxious, but I never had to stop moving.

Even my relapses into anorexia gave me an escape from myself. My eating disorder kept me from feeling anything besides the numbers: calories, miles, pounds. And when I wasn’t in a relapse, I filled the space with Netflix, puzzles, podcasts, texts. Anything but stillness. Anything but my own thoughts.

I didn’t realize it, but I was running. Literally and figuratively. What I was really trying to avoid was the truth inside me, the chaotic parts of my early years, the pain, the imperfection.

So I got lost in the busyness of doing and performing.

And somehow, even then, I managed to build deep friendships. I shared parts of myself, just not all of them. I kept the messier parts hidden. From others, and from myself.

Even once I realized I was doing it, I didn’t know how to stop.

But something changed when I started telling the stories I’d buried underground. At first, just to myself. Then aloud, in therapy, with my husband, with my friends.

That’s when the unburdening began. And something else happened too. I found that I could be with myself. Not again. For the first time. At age forty-seven.

And it’s just in time.

My oldest recently left for college on the opposite coast. My middle son will follow next fall. Yes, I still have my little one, but more importantly, I have me.

A version of me who knows how to sit in stillness. A version of me who doesn’t need noise for protection. A version of me who can be alone and not feel lonely.

It turns out the parts I was hiding were not just the messy ones; they were also the ones that made me whole.

And I’m finally ready to keep them company.

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