Alone at Home

I remember, the first night that I slept in my current dwelling, it dawned on me that this was the first time in my entire life that I was living alone. I was not temporarily alone because everybody else was out. There really was nobody else living there.

I cried for a long time that night. I had signed a one-year lease. I didn’t know how I would be able so manage three hundred and sixty five days of being so alone.

Fortunately, I got used to it really quickly, and it doesn’t really bother me now. As it so happens, it’s been more than a year, and I’m still here.

It’s not so much that I need lots of social contact at home. People who I had lived with before observed that I tended to just go to my room and stay there, sometimes spending days without saying much more than ‘hello’ to the other people there. But when I feel a sudden, urgent need for human contact, I like knowing the option is there. And I still don’t like that I don’t ready access to that type of human contact in my current situation.

That said, there are some really nice things about living alone. I get my own bathroom (though I also had that in a previous situation). I don’t have to negotiate with other people about privacy, cleaning, etc.

I feel I needed to do this at least once in my life. I needed to prove to myself that I could run my own household, even if it’s just a household of one. I especially needed to demonstrate this because I plan to eventually move back in with my parents – when I do live with my parents again, it will definitely not be because I lack the maturity to live away from them (on a different continent, no less). And, as said above, there are some really nice points.

I also know that I never want to do this again.

Sure, living with other people means negotiation, conflict, or most likely both (preferably more negotiation and less conflict, of course). But even though I’m not the most social person in the world, I still like the presence of other people in my living space, and I think that is, in the long term, my preferred mode of living.