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

by Lane Moore

In many ways, we tell people that our family members are allowed to do anything they want to us because we are theirs and they are ours forever. Self-help books often tell us “they did the best they could,” and to forgive them and let it go. That if you’re still hurt or if you dare to speak the truth of what happened, you’re blaming someone else for your problems. Be an adult, move on, grow up. It is not true.

It is so important to know we can hold our relatives, especially our parents, accountable. That regardless of “the best they could do,” if you were not fed or protected or held or shown affection and love and attention, if you did not feel safe, then their best was not good enough. It just wasn’t. And you are then free to do what you want with that information. Maybe that means you don’t talk to them anymore, or you talk to them like you would a coworker who used to steal your lunch from the fridge—with distance and hesitance, but you are allowed to choose your own safety and well-being over the comfort level of someone who did not properly parent you.

5. Yes, it’s totally normal if you get depressed even before the holidays start. I usually get depressed like four days before pretty much every holiday (except Halloweeeeeeeeen!!!) and I always feel like, “WTF? Why am I sad?!” and then I quickly realize, “Ohhh. This holiday is coming up and that is a hard day for me and my body knows and is trying to prepare. Thanks, body, I guess.”

Either way, you’ll still be here, living. Sometimes that’s the bravest thing of all. And if you don’t believe me, it’s a line in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and as I and I both know, that show is everything.

I also greatly recommend staying the hell off social media. You’ll tell yourself it’s no big deal, it’s fine, but the winter holidays, along with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, are hell for people without traditional families. It’s just a sea of people posting about how much they love their families and photos of them doing normal family things. It’s totally possible their families are as complex and painful as yours, but this will not occur to you while you’re sifting through photos of them playing Monopoly with a bunch of elderly people you’ll never meet.

What if you fall outside all the boxes? What are you supposed to do then, other than wrestle with the feelings of otherness, the “oh shit, my sexual-identity deadline is here and I don’t have all my paperwork filled out yet”?

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.

Giving yourself permission to hang out with yourself can absolutely be a gift if you can learn to see yourself as an ally, someone who got you through everything so far, whether it was totally alone or not. You know your whole story. You know everything.

Along with solo dance parties, which truly are the best, most cathartic dance parties. Unless you are the person I aspire to be one day, you’re never going to dance in public with the same reckless, carefree abandon that you have when it’s midnight and you’re in your room alone and your song comes on and you just go for it like you’re in a movie montage.

It’s so nice not having to worry about coordinating a bunch of other people. You want to go to an eleven a.m. movie? Just go. You don’t have to check with anyone about shiiiiit.

More than anything, know that you’re never totally alone. We’re all fed this idea that if we’re not with our perfect person, or the perfect group of Friends-like friends (they weren’t perfect, but you get what I mean) then we’re totally alone. False: You have waiting room friends, or you have coworkers you make jokes with sometimes, or you have that cool old lady at the grocery who smiles at you every time she sees you. And all those people are glad you exist, even on the most basic level. Especially Grocery Store Gayle.

told her my feet had been freezing and my hands were blue and I hadn’t even noticed. That I wished I could be like her. She was cold, she got a blanket. She was thirsty, she got water. She had to pee, she didn’t wait two hours until she was in physical pain and couldn’t hold it anymore, which I’ve always done and only recently realized was weird when I told a friend, “Yeah, I’ve had to pee for, like, two hours,” and they said simply, “Why???” I told her I wished I could need something and my brain would register that and immediately fill that need. She looked at me and said, “Lane, I’ve always wanted to have an apartment where people could feel at home. It means the world to me that I have this couch and these blankets to give you so you can feel warm and comfortable. Because I’m so glad we’re friends and I want you to feel at home here.”

We section off physical comfort and intimacy so heavily. We reserve it for partners only, and platonic friends can only chitchat and that’s it. How can you tell people to be okay with being single while also telling them they can only get the basic human needs of physical touch from not being single?

But then, TV characters cry in each other’s laps, and race over with ice cream and hair braiding when someone so much as drops their car keys. And we’re told this is normal and everyone but you has six loyal friends they see every single day. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I watch people in groups a lot—at meditation centers, yoga classes, even my apartment building—and I know people want to work together. Our base nature is to be together, work together, help each other—and it’s only removed once we have been hurt or denied that help from others, or had that desire ripped from us. But I know it’s still there when people smile at you on the street, or hold the door for you when they didn’t have to.

Having thought I’d get a dog when I got married or had a proper yard, years from now, I began to panic. I took her to get microchipped and the woman at the rescue organization said, “Are you thinking about keeping her?” and I said, “I think, maybe,” and she said, “Well, dogs are a big commitment. How would you feel about having her for the next ten years?” and I said without thinking, “That’s not enough time.” I loved her already and it scared the shit out of me.

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.”

One of the perks of being alone this long, I guess, is I never want anyone to feel as awful as I have, even for a second.

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.

You take all that love you keep giving to selfish idiots and try to throw some of it in the general direction of your own heart and you pray even a little bit of it sticks there.