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

by Lane Moore

My favorite response whenever I tell people I don’t really have a family is “But what about your grandparents?” or “But what about your siblings?”—a 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 then I think, Maybe they didn’t know how bad it was, I wasn’t technically their problem, etc., etc., forever; 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.

These seemingly straightforward forms lay bare everything I carry with me about myself, all of the information that tells a story no one wants to read. And this process always starts off with two words followed by a blank space you’re supposed to know what to do with: Emergency contact: ______.

They’re super helpful, but I feel like there’s an unspoken time limit in terms of how much I can talk about how hard things are, so I usually keep it to about three texts and then change the subject back to them and how I can help them through their day, and they don’t challenge me when I do this, and it feels awful.

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.

sometimes wonder if my imagination is so intense because I spent so much of my life imagining this was not my reality. So it won’t surprise you at all to know that I was obsessed with witches as a kid.

don’t know what it is about Saturday night that makes me want to leap off tall buildings in a single bound. I think it’s probably because Saturday nights are like weekly New Year’s Eves. You’re supposed to not be alone, you’re supposed to do something So Fun!!! You’re supposed to have friends and it’s supposed to be the Best, and when it’s anything less, you just feel like you’re six thousand miles away from your best life, and fun, and normalcy.

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. They laughed at me like I was a wacky child pulling a wacky stunt: kids say the darnedest things, etc. 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.

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.

When you don’t have a baseline of love and security and home, and you finally get someone who can seemingly love you and you feel accepted and special and you feel like “Aw, is this home? Finally! I can’t wait! This is so great!” and then they kick you out, you feel like you’ve lost everything. You don’t have a foundation, so you look everywhere for one, which means the weight of any one connection is so heavy, so important, so delicate. If you lose it, what else will you have? And it has definitely kept me in a ton of awful friendships and relationships because I’d felt like I had nothing or no one else to fall back on. I’d

When I’m with friends now, as an adult, I don’t want to have polite adult tea and talk about our jobs. I don’t want to sit in dress pants while we talk about a New Yorker article. Not really. I want to lie on the couch, cozy in blankets, watching movies, feeling safe enough to pass out and stay the night if we want to. I want to turn English muffins into foundations for pizza bagels at ten p.m., even though they’re not as good as bagels and we know it. I want to tell each other things we can’t talk about online, or we can’t tell our coworkers, and to cry and still be lovable, even if we’re in pain sometimes. To break in front of each other, and pick up the pieces together, before making some dumb joke and telling each other we love each other and knowing we’re safe to be all of it.

Oh

There’s a specific sort of obsession with love that you’re bound to find yourself having once you’ve realized, on any level, that you don’t have a family the way you’re supposed to. There’s a need in there to be normal, to be wanted, to belong to anyone, anywhere, as soon as humanly possible, that really lends itself to loving super-romantic shit of all kinds. Because okay, sure, it’s clear the whole “having family like you’re supposed to have a family” thing is off the table for me, BUT oh my God, there’s this other thing called a “soul mate” AND THAT PERSON WILL FIX EVERYTHING!!! Phew, thank God.

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.

For me, it was less about imagining a romantic ideal and more about having a receptacle for my thoughts and feelings, and a caretaker who saw me for who I was.

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. 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.

We don’t give the people who don’t have the right connections and supreme wealth the map to where the opportunities are, and then when they forge a path there themselves, against immense odds, we charge them a fee for admission we know they can’t afford. And then we reward incredibly fortunate, connected, and bankrolled creators without acknowledging there was almost no way they would ever fail. Again, I don’t begrudge anyone who comes from a super-supportive family, or a super-wealthy family, or a super-wealthy AND supportive family, but it is so important to remember that having a support system, having a safe, loving family who encourages you and guides you and financially supports you, giving you a safe place to fall—these are luxuries.

When you go from a childhood where you’re not only painfully alone but often frightened as well, to having the chance to be on your own, even if that means you’re homeless in the dead of winter, sleeping in your freezing car in a scary part of town, you’ll gladly take it. It’s a step up, a comparative paradise. Did I feel safe? No. Had I ever felt safe? No. At least now my life was mine, and I could finally say I was alone and have no one look for the asterisk. And maybe now people would care, maybe then they’d see. But no one ever did.

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.

Not long after this date, I would write a song called “It’s Like You’re Not Even Trying” with the lyrics “You say, you say there’s a fence around me, I’m not letting you in / But I say it’s a climbable distance / You just don’t wanna put the time in,” 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.

For so much of my childhood, my dad made us fake our way through dinners with his friends, pretending that we were one big happy family. And I wasn’t interested in faking it then and I wasn’t interested in faking it now. I couldn’t get through a dinner without wanting to shout, “I’M SAD. ARE YOU GUYS SAD? CAN WE AT LEAST ACKNOWLEDGE WE’RE ALL KIND OF SAD, AND THEN FINE, SURE, WE CAN TALK ABOUT THE FUCKING BRIE!!!!!!!!!!”

I have never read anything which sums up how I feel about small talk more accurately than this

When I was a kid, my mom described her relationship with my dad as “He was so sweet at first. Always so sweet at first. But then . . .” I have spent my entire life terrified of the “but then.” And I spent the entirety of my relationship with Everett worrying that one day, if I got too comfortable, if I accepted the constant compliments about my being the most beautiful girl in the world, the ever-present stunning bouquets, the apartment full of food just for me, and the requests for me to come to lunch with his grandma so she could meet me, a trapdoor would open and inside would be him, ready to beat the shit out of me for falling for it.

Still, in his mind, he’d said his “Oops,” and then asked me where I wanted to go to dinner that night, like, “Case closed. I told you whoops, whoops was admitted, so, sushi?”

“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’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.

the less he understood why I was scared, the more I thought, “Ah yes, I need more than this. And I know how to operate in a place where I need so much more than I am getting.”

once you’ve meant something to me, you’re in my heart forever. Even if we dated for only a few months, if those months forged a deep closeness, however fleeting, even if you eviscerated me in the end, I would still pick up the phone if you needed me. Because we meant something to each other once. And it confuses me and breaks my heart that no one else seems to think like that.

I have absolutely thought, during my lowest points, about my exes who were everything to me and wondered if reaching out to them would help, looking for the cure in the cause of the disease.

At times I’ve struggled to feel seen, to have my history feel seen, to have where I come from feel seen because I “turned out great.” But that doesn’t mean that I Am Fine. I am working every day, tirelessly, like you wouldn’t believe, on being fine, fucking finally, can we get this over with, I’m so tired and I just want to travel and eat and smile and move through the world with a semblance of peace.

I was recently at the post office and saw a card that read, “Good moms create great kids,” and almost flipped all of them around in an attempt to spare anyone else who hates seeing that oversimplified shit when they’re just trying to mail an eBay package.

So if you raised yourself, and you’re reading this, I am so proud of you. You raised a hell of a kid. And it wasn’t easy—I can’t even imagine, no one can. (Okay, I kind of can, but still.) But you’re here and you could’ve easily backslid into pain and nothingness and worthlessness and hopelessness, and maybe you did backslide, time and again, but every time, you climbed back up and tried to be kinder and softer and find more room in your heart for compassion instead of hatred, hope instead of defeat. And let me tell you, someone (you) really raised you right.

I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t think I needed to start earning money so I could support myself.

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.

I have this dream of being whole. Of not going to sleep each night, wanting. But still sometimes, when the wind is warm or the crickets sing . . . I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for. —SALLY OWENS, PRACTICAL MAGIC

Why can’t we respond to someone’s cute texts right away? Why can’t we say yes to dates instead of playing coy? Why can’t we sleep with someone as soon as we want to? Because if we do something wrong, we might mess everything up? Nonsense. Whenever I start thinking that way, I remind myself, “If this person is really your soul mate, you can’t text them too much or too soon or be too much for them. If it’s right, there’s nothing you can do wrong.”

We know trying to change someone won’t work, so we’ve created a work-around for this, which is supporting our partners while they treat us like shit, and being so so patient while they hopefully magically become better people. Which is totally different from trying to change someone! It is! Because obviously trying to change someone is so stupid, haha, for sure. And we’re not doing that! We’re just providing the emotional labor and the tools and the insight and a place for their pain and rage to go, holding anything they need like an unpaid therapist, so they can magically change on their own. Please. It’s the same thing.

And yes, I do watch these shows over and over again, often curating specific episodes like “Okay, so we should start here because this is when Ben and Leslie first meet,” like I’m creating a super-cut version of the show that plays out like a twenty-hour rom-com. And even though that’s a fucking long rom-com, I am always so gutted when TV shows end, when a TV rewatch is done. Often I’ll go back and start the whole thing over again because I don’t want to leave that world. I want to stay safely wrapped inside it, so immersed I feel like I can move within that world, that I live inside it, that I’m a part of it.

“Oh my god, Lane. I just realized something. You rewatch your favorite shows because they’re like your family. The characters are people who are there for you when you need them, you’ve grown to love them, you know them well, you’ve spent so much time with them. In some cases, the shows were with you when you were growing up, they raised you, they’re your family. And when they’re done, you don’t want them to leave because then you’re alone again and your family is gone.”

I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.jpg

Am I the only one who has literally thought about dating every single person I’ve ever met who was in my age and sexual-preference range? Even if only for a second? I’ve lived my whole life with every person I meet, every person I spark with, wondering if the next frame is us falling in love.

In my experience, the people who use the term orphan Thanksgiving or even orphan Christmas seem to be blissfully unaware that it’s even possible to have abusive relatives, or to have lost your parents, or to have been abandoned by your parents, or to have been kicked out of your home by your parents, or to have had to make the difficult choice to run away from or stop speaking to your family because they were unsafe, which, yes, is a thing.

However, I’ve been using that term to describe myself since I was a little kid, and later on would make these jokes about being a tree spawn as my way of being, like, “Things are not okay at home, but it’s okay because I made it a joke!!!!!!! Seriously though, intervene at any time, guys, LOL. I’M NOT OKAY!”

It just goes back to that unacknowledged privilege that comes with having a loving, supportive family who makes you feel safe. It’s so hard to tell people, “Yeah, the holidays kind of bum me out because my best friend as a kid was a caterpillar I kept in a muffin-tin liner in my room.”

And it’s even worse because you’re already in pain anyway, the pain of knowing you’re other, and so to have to publicly hide that just reinforces what you already knew: You don’t fit anywhere and you’re bumming everyone out.

Around the time that we get the freaking GIFT that is Halloween (aka my favorite and insanely beloved “why can’t it be year-round?!” holiday, because you don’t have to have anyone on earth who loves you to celebrate it, you just need to love pumpkins and goth stuff, all

I spent most of my childhood doing what I’ve heard a lot of kids from abusive or neglectful homes do: thinking this is secretly what everyone else had too and that we were all just trying to make it to eighteen in one technically alive piece.

Every year, I swear to God, I see it coming up and I think, “Lane, you got this. It’s just a day. It’s just a day like any other day where you’ll wake up and you’ll do what you always do and you’ll be fine.”

I’m realizing, “Oh, I don’t think I’m a weak piece of shit for not being able to handle the holidays, after a lifetime of not being able to handle the holidays.”

1. No, you don’t deserve this. You’re not alone during the holidays because you deserve to be—everyone deserves a great family who loves them and makes them feel safe. The fact that you never had that is not the result of your being unlovable or because something is wrong with you. I know (because I am you) that you’re, like, “Duh, I know that,” but seriously, around this time of year it’s so easy to subconsciously think otherwise. But I know you deserve every bit as much love and normalcy as everyone else. Never doubt this. Though I know you do. Again, because I am literally you.

3. Yes, you’re allowed to celebrate or not celebrate the holidays however you want. So if you’re currently prepping for the holidays via a combination of “not acknowledging the holidays at all,” “turning my phone off and watching movies while eating snacks,” with a possible side dish of “crying, so much crying,” I support that manner of “choose your own adventure, but whatever you choose, just stay alive.”

I want to acknowledge all of the people reading this who have been brave enough to see their parents as harmful, because it is not an easy task. 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. It takes, in no uncertain terms, bravery to admit to yourself, but especially out loud to other people, that your family is not safe, did not do enough, and are not people you want in your life. It flies in the face of everything our culture tells us.