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

by Lane Moore

bizarre move on their part to assume I actually have, like, twenty relatives who love and support me and I just didn’t look hard enough for them.

but I would just assume that if you talk to me almost daily, you should care if I died. If you deal with suicidal ideation or depression or anxiety, that’s often part of how you define someone’s ability to be close to you, or to be a true friend.

What if you, like me, would at times throw your whole life out the window and walk away, in hopes there was somewhere you could go and buy an entirely new life with new problems, new people, new everything, as if you were replacing a shitty sweater you’d worn through? Except you get only one sweater for your whole life, and anything can happen—theft, weather, cars that splash you with dirt, stains that do and don’t come out—but you can’t trade it in or take it off. It’s just yours and it’s you, forever and ever and ever.

Because of that, I can say with some certainty that I was bananas in love with every best girlfriend I ever had from the ages of six to seventeen.

The Friend Zone, while not always ideal, is still a goddamn gift, and really, the definition of true love.

Both of us exhausted, we flopped onto my bed. I don’t know how, but we started talking about things that scared us. It wasn’t framed that way, but that’s what it was, and often is with friends at that age. The gentle and very quiet opening-up that happens late at night when you should be asleep already.

That intense Anne of Green Gables romanticism, bursting from every cell in my body, came from a similar place in me as it did in Anne: a tragic backstory and a desperate need to belong to someone. Unlike Anne, I never met my magical adoptive family, though to this day I continue to long for it with every heartbeat, like an ancient shelter dog that knows it might not have much time left but maybe someone is coming, maybe they are.

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. A huge part of this, I think, came from my lack of a capital-letter Family, a lack of having backup. I’ve talked to friends who will say when they’ve been in shitty situations, they’ll call their parents. I truly don’t know anyone with family who doesn’t use them all the time like a fucking credit card with every dollar matched by cash back rewards. When I’ve been in dire circumstances, or had a roommate screw me over on a deposit I was owed or a job that just didn’t pay me because “Laws? what laws,” 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’ve always wished that people who had hurt me would magically text me: “Hey, I noticed you were upset, and instead of assuming it was nothing, I took the initiative to reexamine my behavior and realize I was being a jerk. Because I did this, I’m sparing you the emotional labor of explaining to me how I hurt you. Here are action steps for how I’ll make it right.” But so far it’s been just me and a five-hour conversation I have to initiate, on top of being hurt, and it makes you want to never date again.

Still, it is very commonplace for abusive or absent parents, once their (technical) child grows up and becomes successful, to suddenly become Proud Parents!

I had become very, very skilled at being poised and witty and very adult. Being a child is so lonely in and of itself, even without added abuse and neglect and fear for your own life and the lives of everyone around you; merging the two can create a powder keg of need that quickly solidified my one huge goal: to work all the time, in every possible way, and to be perfect. To be so perfect they had to hire me, had to notice me, had to see me, had to love me, had to take care of me.

Subconsciously, I thought if I couldn’t find the person I’d been waiting my whole life for, I’d be that person for other people.

I’ve treated every person I’ve ever been excited about (which excludes random dating-app people because I’ve been excited about maybe one of those ever) like this was a possible beginning of our lives together, focused on the task at hand.

Anyway, my point is I have lots of friends and leave my house with a regularity that is congruent with social norms.

We are raised with maxims like “Blood is thicker than water” and “Respect your elders” in a culture where family, no matter how harmful, truly is everything. From an early age, a deification process begins with our parents, and even if they are flawed or harmful, they are the sun and the moon and can often remain that way.

their best was not good enough.

I poured it all out. Every bit I had. And she took them all and closed the door behind her. And this is why anxious attachment people shouldn’t date fucking avoidant people.

then became the one who refused to see the red flags, and would go on to rip myself inside out every weekend for a month, explaining myself over and over again, like the right words would bring the other Max back.

People have these entire worlds, entire histories inside of them, with thousands of knots tied by people you’ll probably never meet and will never know, so your helping to untie them is just not a thing.

I knew this was a conversation like the thousands of others in which she would have a moment of clarity and insight and ownership of what she’d done, and acknowledge the colossal damage she’d caused, but in all likelihood, any recently developed insight would vanish by morning, just as it did when I had similar conversations with my family as a child.

If you see a woman who is working super hard to become who she’s meant to be and to achieve the things she wants to achieve, and you have nothing to add to her life or to give back to her in any way, please just leave her the fuck alone.

Also, don’t be too worried if you want to be alone a lot lately. Bamboo grows underground for three years before it sprouts up to thirty feet tall. Nothing blooms year-round, so if you need to be alone right now, that’s what you need.

having someone touch you in a safe, gentle way, even for two seconds, feels like it changes your whole world.

And I adopted her. And I held her close and told her, “I am your family now and I will always be here, always, always. You have been through so much and you deserve the whole world. And I want to be the one to give it to you.”

As long as I’m alive and breathing, I want to tell that girl in the park she looks beautiful today, I want to tell the girl who’s crying on the subway I see her and it’ll be okay, even if I can’t guarantee that. I want to tell my friends they’re special and deserve love and I will always be here for them, even if I’m not entirely sure they’ll always, or even momentarily, be there for me. To me, the closest I’ve been able to get to not feeling alone is, at the very least, my hope that I can help people feel less alone too.