How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

by Lane Moore

Even now, as I sit here writing this, I have never felt loved, in the way I imagine many of you have, in my entire life. I know that sounds depressing, so don’t worry; my brain has responded accordingly by being depressed. I wish I had felt loved. It seems pretty cool.

If you tell someone your parent is an alcoholic or an addict, they seemingly, on some level, get that you had a rough childhood. You don’t need to expand for hours, trying to prove your case like a lawyer with the odds stacked against him. Or in some cases spend your whole life trying to figure out if, wait a minute, holy shit, your parents actually were toxic after all, like you’re trapped inside a one-player game of Clue and the big mystery is “Why am I like this?”

When it’s not that simple, or you don’t have any of that information, it’s that much easier to go your whole life thinking it’s just you; you’re too sensitive, you’re wrong, you need too much, you could fix your relationship with them if you wanted to, if you would just do the right thing, whatever that is, only God knows, but you should die trying.

My extended family exists, and I passively love most of them in the same way you might if you saw a childhood teacher at the grocery store who always seemed nice enough.

that desperation to believe that the people who hurt you didn’t know, had a rough day, aren’t bad people, that it was all a misunderstanding. And if they knew what they did or didn’t do, they’d say sorry. They would.

People who are fighting their own gigantic battles and are therefore either too triggering or send me into a spiral where I focus all the energy I should be using on myself to help them survive. With these people, I always leave the conversation feeling used and drained. To be fair, they did not ask me to turn myself inside out to help them, but my brain is so hardwired to kill myself to let someone else live, someone who is actually not dying at all, and give them the blood I need to survive when they’ve at no point suggested they needed so much as a drop, that I pour mine out into their veins, and since they absolutely did not need it, it overflows, dripping onto the floor, helping no one.

I have a lot of internet friends with whom I trade voice memos and GIFs, and strangers on the internet who DM me the sweetest fucking things, but on a deep, unrelenting level, I do not have anyone I would call if I were dying. I would blank. I have blanked.

On some level I walk through the world like an adult human version of the baby bird in Are You My Mother? subconsciously waiting for someone to see that I’m very take-care-of-able, can I live with you now?

It’s hard not to throw everything I’ve written so far out the fucking window right now because I don’t want you to know this, because I don’t want you to hate me for being so sad and not normal, but then I think, What if you know exactly what I mean?

Kids with stable home lives can Make Friends™ in that casual, take ’em or leave ’em way, but you, poor you, will want to MAKE FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!!! in a desperate, gasping for air while drowning kind of way. And so did I.

Also, this was definitely a convenient way for us to be like “We like each other . . . haha, no we don’t! Ginger and Baby Spice do! We aren’t gay, THEY’RE gay! We’re just playing gay CHARACTERS who do gay things, but we don’t because we’re NOT GAY. Hahaha. If you shout it, it becomes more true!!!”)

I sometimes wonder if my imagination is so intense because I spent so much of my life imagining this was not my reality.

I got us tickets to see Joni Mitchell for my birthday, even though at that time Joni Mitchell was more Sam’s favorite than mine, so I had literally gotten us a birthday present for her, on my birthday, which speaks volumes about what I thought true romantic love was back then: all about the other person and nothing about me at all. Healthy stuff.

With Sam, she proved my worst fears to be true: that I was too much and needed too much. I’ve spent so many of my relationships being terrified the person I love will hurt me, and always questioning whether or not the other person really means what they say, and worrying if I love more, or feel more, and what that means if it’s true.

My parents were going out to dinner when I was six or so, and before they left, I felt instantly desperate and went to the bathroom and grabbed my mom’s lipstick and put red dots all over my body and then begged them not to go. “I have chicken pox, you can’t leave,” I said. I remember they both laughed and laughed and then they left. And I cried and couldn’t stop.

But I think about that night all the time, that little kid desperate for someone to love her, take care of her, spend any time at all with her, make her feel connected to literally anyone or anything, and they just laughed. And left.

I realized the only time anyone would take care of me when I was a kid was when I was sick, when they were forced to (and this fell on my mom, because I don’t think my dad literally ever took care of anyone but himself). So I made myself sick all the time, just so she’d spend time with me.

Even now when I get sick I often get impossibly depressed because I just want someone to take care of me, like I wanted someone to take care of me then, and no one’s coming for either of us.

I can honestly say I have spent my entire life searching for romantic love in a way that I thought for a very long time was adorable and that I now see as heartbreakingly sad.

my subsequent coping strategy of “leave before anyone can leave me” relationship patterns,

Now, I think of my tired, overdosed little-kid self, who only wanted someone to love her, no matter what it took—drugs? Okay! Alcohol? Sure!—lying there on the floor alone in a little ball, waiting for anyone to care about her, and all I want to do is pick her up and kiss her forehead and tell her I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect her.

When you grow up without real parenting or boundaries, you can talk yourself into believing it’s totally normal for twenty-four-year-olds to date thirteen-year-olds.

I loved singing the songs in exactly the same way each person sang them, leading me to be able to sing like anyone.

I can see now that I used the idea of a soul mate to give myself some sort of parental figure, some sort of protector, someone who was able to see that everything that was happening was not okay, that I deserved more, who could validate everything I was experiencing, since no one around me seemed like they’d be doing any of that any time soon. And if that figure didn’t exist, I would make one up.

this actually led to james im crying

Basically, there are three primary attachment styles: secure, avoidant, and anxious, and occasional combinations of avoidant and anxious. Your attachment style develops in childhood via how you attached or didn’t attach to your parents, and then often translates to exactly how you do or do not attach to people when you get older.

STOPPP IM TIRED OF GETTING CALLED OUT BY THESE DAMN ATTACHMENT STYLES!!!

I didn’t hate them, I don’t hate them. Because that’s the life you’re supposed to have at that age. Stupid and frantic, and fucking up and getting bailed out and trying again.

The kids (I was easily the youngest person there, but have literally never felt like the youngest person in any room I’ve ever been in. Even when I was ten, I was easily forty in trauma years)

If you’re wondering why I didn’t just leave and find another apartment, know that it never crossed my mind once. A combination of being taught from birth to survive anything, I had become a creature who could deny all my physical and emotional needs existed. I don’t even feel them anymore; if I can get through it and not die, I have no other needs.

it was “You’re on your own, kid.” There was no “Oh, I’ll call this person for help or advice.” There was only a voice in my head saying, “Fucking figure it out on your own and stop whining. It’s not that bad.”

I slipped out to the fire escape and called everyone who came to mind, which was no one. But in an effort to be like Normal People, I called my sister. My sister, like my mom, had been someone I would occasionally call like a reflex because I wanted to be normal, and they would answer, perhaps because they also wanted to be normal.

I hear friends and colleagues say it all the time, how nothing they’ve done would be possible if it weren’t for their family, and a knot forms in my stomach and sometimes it’s so sharp I check for physical bleeding. This is not petty envy, not about who is right and who is wrong; it is simply a cigarette-burn-to-the-arm reminder of what I could’ve had and didn’t.

I adapt so easily to any kind of communal environment, it’s a wonder I’ve never been sucked into a cult.)

They treated me like family and told me at the end of my stay that during the dolphin trip, they’d all talked and said they felt like they could be a family for me, would love to be that for me. And I cried because I had been adopted like I’d always wanted. But the feeling ebbed and flowed as I grappled with not really being their family, and having that confirmed when I’d later ask when I could come back to see them and they’d say, “Well, the winter won’t work because that’s the holidays, so we’re busy with family stuff.” And I remembered who I was. Not theirs. Not anyone’s.

The exceptional, overwhelming kindness of strangers who immediately see me and my heart as special and full and open and innately, unequivocally, deserving of love and care right out of the gate, no questions asked, has often left me gut-punched and confused. For years, I’d think that surely my family had to be right about me because they knew me best, they knew the truth: that I was nothing and no one and I was bad and horrible and should’ve been a baby in a dumpster, good riddance. Strangers were all just fooled by some surface-level magic I was performing—that had to be it—and if I’d spent any further time with them, if they really knew, they’d see it, they’d see the truth that my family was right. So I stayed away from people and wouldn’t get too close to them when they seemed like they wanted to love me and could love me and would love nothing more than to love me—if I’d let them. So I didn’t. It would’ve hurt too much to finally feel loved and then, once they’d realized they’d wasted their time, and I was bad and worthless, to have them leave and come back again, or become unsafe seemingly because the wind blew differently that day, just like my family. No thanks. Better to be alone the way I’d always been.

If you’re driving on the highway and there’s a giant gorgeous garden that’s remarkable and special and unlike anything you’ve ever seen, you’ll see it coming from miles away, and even if you see only a flash of it, going sixty miles per hour, you’ll know it’s incredible. You don’t have to spend a ton of time looking at it to know that, and even if you don’t inspect it closely, you know what you know and there’s no need to question it. It’s lovely. The end. But if you’re driving past it very quickly and hateful...

The next morning, and I will never forget this, I had a very, very long email from one Everett Roth that went a lot like this, but very abridged. I wish I had all of the originals, but I tend to lean toward the delete button quick as you can wrong me, even if only by mistake. I have a trigger-happy “erase all evidence of happiness now that you’ve caused me pain, real or imagined” finger, and I often wish I didn’t.

which was inspired by my constant push and pull with Everett’s being annoyed with me for not being able to trust him immediately, and my hating him for choosing to love someone who had been through this much, and then yelling at her when she couldn’t shake off a lifetime of trauma and terror she didn’t even fully understand, because it would make his life more convenient.

this is annoying. am i this annoying? im so sorry

Why can’t we just stay home and watch documentaries I don’t want to watch but you do want to watch while I sit through them, bored out of my mind, and ohhhh, I see now that this relationship was bad.

And I remember when he showed me all this, I wanted to run. My response, based on some prior, super-fucked-up life experiences, was seriously, “Are you going to force me to date you until all of this is gone????”

And so I stayed Fiona Apple “Shadowboxer”-braced, ready for him to fucking try something. And then, when my terror from waiting became too much to bear, I started breaking up with him constantly.

Everett knew how to live comfortably, richly, and well, and he was an adult. And unfortunately I was still a scared little kid who was programmed to merely survive and had no chill.

Everett’s love languages (and I know that term is cringeworthy, but still) were gift-giving and service, a potent combination I was immediately drawn to, but I didn’t feel like he saw me or really loved me. I didn’t learn about love languages until years later, but if I’d known about them then, I would’ve known why we didn’t work. Currently, my love languages are gift-giving, service, and compliments. But at the time, service was definitely not on that list, since I held on so tightly to my I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BY MYSELF OKAY I HAVE THIS LEAVE ME ALONE beliefs with a freaking death grip.

oh

I see now that I was overwhelmed by the weight of not being able to tell him what I needed, physically, emotionally, sexually, or what I didn’t want, physically, emotionally, and sexually, because I had no idea what was going on inside my head.

When you don’t have a support system, being patient while waiting for a soul mate is fucking impossible. So if you have someone in the ring at all, even one stick of shitty gum that gives you a stomachache, it still feels so much better than nothing.

“Please please notice I am not okay, I am forbidden from asking for help due to shitty patterns from my childhood, so please let me know it is okay to ask”—“Oh

I begged him to stop yelling at me and told him if he was going to keep doing it, I would have to get off the phone, trying to handle him with love and respect because I don’t believe in blindly hanging up on people you love, even when you should.

I wrote him a furious letter calling him out for all of it, just scathing and angry, making everything black-and-white in my mind, a skill I’d learned in order to keep myself safe. “Safe, Unsafe, there is no third option, Lane, run!”

Those have always been the scenes that killed me most, the ones where someone has hurt someone or let someone down, but then, just in the nick of time, there’s a knock at the door and an acknowledgment of everything that the person has done wrong, and everything you needed and will now get: a kiss and a chance—nay, a promise—of a future.

And again I felt broken, not worth it, a benchwarmer who might never be sent back out to play again but who had nowhere else to go.

We’d act like we were still dating, but when I’d try to push past whatever curtains seemed to be in front of who we really were, and what was really happening, he would shut down and pull away. I’d cry and ask how this was so easy for him, how he could act so casual.