Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else

by Maeve Higgins

I know that many people dread the prospect of being alone; they fear that the solitude will magnify their flaws and force them to face up to who they really are. But the funny thing I’ve discovered is that being alone can actually be a way of escaping who you are, or who you think you are, a chance to make up new versions, better versions. I’m not talking about the witness protection program here, rather the gentle way you can surprise yourself, the way that is too easily undone by a companion with a set idea of how you should be. I’ve found that being alone allows me to become part of a place, to somehow melt into the fabric of it, however foreign I may be to that place. When I am alone, nobody will say, however fondly, It’s so like you to say that, Maeve. Or, Hmm, I didn’t think you’d like Turkish coffee. I’ve been to all sorts of places—a dumpling house in Melbourne, a wedding in Brooklyn, a public park in Shiraz—and I have really been there, really experienced them. Those places have absorbed me without question, because I was able to disperse myself among them. I was not this whole formed thing, this solid block, I was just floating particles that formed and reformed as they wished or needed to, with no clear set of rules, nobody else’s expectations to act into.